Will Self possesses one of the greatest literary imaginations of any
writer working today. How the Dead Live is his most extraordinary
book, yet a novel that will challenge, entertain, and truly astonish.
Lily Bloom is an aging American transplanted to England who has lost her
battle with cancer and lies wasting away at the Royal Ear Hospital. As
her two daughters, lumpy Charlotte, who runs a hugely successful chain
of stationery stores called Waste of Paper, and beautiful Natasha, a
junkiebuzz around her, and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily
slides in and out of the present, taking us on a surreal, opinionated
trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. A career girl in
the 1940s, a sexed-up, tippling adulteress in the 1950s and '60s, a
divorced PR flak in the 1970s and '80s, Lily presents us with a portrait
of America and England over 60 years of riotous and unreal change.
And then it's over: Lily catches a cab with the aboriginal wizard Phar
Lap Jones, her guide to the shockingly banal world of the dead. It's a
world that is surreal but familiar, where she again works in PR and
rediscovers how great smoking is, where her cohabitants include Rude
Boy, the son who died at age nine and now swears a blue streak, and
three eyeless, murmuring wraiths, the Fats composed of the pounds,
literally the whole selves, she lost and gained over her lifetime. As
Lily settles into her nonexistence, the most difficult challenge for
this staunchly difficult woman is how to understand that she's dead, and
how to leave the rest behind.
How the Dead Live is an unforgettable portrait of the human condition,
the struggle with life and with death. It's a novel that will disturb
and provoke, the work, in the words of one British reviewer, "of a
novelist writing at the height of his powers."
