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How the Dead Live

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Dark humor explores afterlife with biting wit.

"How the Dead Live" isn't your typical ghost story; it's for those who like their supernatural laced with acid satire. Will Self takes you on a bizarre journey through an afterlife full of as much, if not more, vibrancy and vulgarity as life itself. If you appreciate a narrative that challenges the norms with sharp humor, Lily Bloom's post-mortem adventures are sure to entertain and provoke thought.

  • Whitbread Award Nominee for Novel (2000)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.
Sale

How the Dead Live

Regular price $8.68 Now $5.90 Save 32%
Unit price
per
ISBN: 9780140268652
Authors: Will Self
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date of Publication: 2001-01-01
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: Fantasy, Horror, Contemporary, Literary Fiction
Goodreads rating: 3.58
(rated by 2886 readers)

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Description

In April 1988, 65-year-old Lily Bloom quickly succumbs to cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital. But after life there's death. Guided by an aborigine named Phar Lap Jones, she is transported by a Greek Cypriot minicab driver to the North London dead neighborhood of Dulston. There, accompanied by her dead son, Rude Boy, she's introduced to the 12-step Personally Dead meetings, and she watches over her living daughters--the cold, ambitious Charlotte, and her favorite, the heroin-addicted Natasha. Since Will Self's face, voice, and, notoriously, life story are familiar to many who will never pick up his fiction, there's always the risk of reading How the Dead Live as autobiography. In which case, he's clearly based Lily on his New York-born Jewish mother, and he's wittily retooled large chunks of his own much-publicized addictions, transmuting himself into the beautiful and glamorously doomed Natasha. But Lily is feisty and articulate, with a complex history spanning two continents, two husbands, and a constantly re-created personality--a great literary creation. Self's sympathetic account of Lily's decline into her morphine-laden deathbed is deeply affecting, and his long-term obsession with London provides us with the utterly convincing Dulston. His treatment of modern Jewish life in North London (rather than New York) will find its fans and
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Similar Reads

Dark humor explores afterlife with biting wit.

"How the Dead Live" isn't your typical ghost story; it's for those who like their supernatural laced with acid satire. Will Self takes you on a bizarre journey through an afterlife full of as much, if not more, vibrancy and vulgarity as life itself. If you appreciate a narrative that challenges the norms with sharp humor, Lily Bloom's post-mortem adventures are sure to entertain and provoke thought.

  • Whitbread Award Nominee for Novel (2000)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.