Ebook: How the dead live

Lily Bloom, an elderly American dying of cancer in a British hospital, retraces her life and then enters a rather banal world of the dead Will Self is a novelist of world-class stature, an unparalleled literary craftsman with a ferocious insight. In How the Dead Live, he gives us his best and most important book yet, an incisive and troubling dissection of the spiritual emptiness and death in our culture. Lily Bloom is an aging American in final-stage cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in Central London. Not that there's anything wrong with her ears -- it's just the only bed they could find for her. As her two daughters buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in and out of consciousness, outraged that there's so little time left and so much hate still to go around. In her delirium she rails against everything, from the sins of those in the immediate proximity to the world at large, viewed through the lens of her paranoid bigotry. In the corner of the ward sits an impassive, middle-aged Aboriginal Australian man, who from time to time reminds Lily that it will be his responsibility to ferry her across the Styx, and that in lieu of a coin, he'll happily accept her dentures. How the Dead Live is an unforgettable portrait of the human struggle with mortality. In it, Will Self has given us a book that will change the way we talk about death, a novel that, like Underworld or Mason & Dixon, will be a literary sensation remembered for years to come