Will Self has one of literature's most astonishing imaginations, and in
How the Dead Live his talent has come to full flower. Lily Bloom is an
angry, aging American transplanted to England, now losing her battle
with cancer. Attended by nurses and her two daughters -- lumpy
Charlotte, a dour, successful businesswoman, and beautiful Natasha, a
junkie -- Lily takes us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the
stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. From '40s career girl to '50s
tippling adulteress to '70s PR flak, Lily has seen America and England
through most of a century of riotous and unreal change. And then it's
over. Lily catches a cab with her death guide, Aboriginal wizard Phar
Lap Jones, and enters the shockingly banal world of the dead: the
suburbs. She discovers smoking without consequences and gets another PR
job, where none of her coworkers notices that she's not alive. She gets
to know her roommates: Rude Boy, her terminally furious son who died in
a car accident at age nine; Lithy, a fetus that died before she ever
knew it existed; the Fats, huge formless shapes composed of all the
weight she's ever gained or lost. How the Dead Live is Will Self's most
remarkable and expansively human book, an important, disturbing vision
of our time.
