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Title: How the Dead Live

Author: Will Self

Narrator: Nancy Linari

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-04-15

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

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".

Members Reviews:

Depressing

Well, I said I would pass on this author but since I bought two together, I decided to read. Although I found the writing amazing...one really has to study his words...I constantly had to look things up..(that's good, by the way), in the end I guess it just went on too long - the first half of the book concerns the woman who is dying, her relationships with her children and various men, all with brutal honesty and I enjoyed that. The second half I struggled through. I mean once you can adapt to the idea that the dead are really "living" on the other side, the way these spirits roam around doing essentially nothing....was just too too far for me to get into. I finally gave it up about 3/4 of the way into the book.

Mesmerising

As I read my way through the Factory Series I cannot understand why the author is not better known. This, the third book, finds our protagonist investigating the disappearance of a prominent inhabitant of a small village, where the local police have done nothing to investigate it. It is exciting, funny and very moving. Derek Raymond is one of the greatest crime writers, ever.

Amazing Work

I am so glad to have read about this series in a Ken Bruen interview. Really great stuff. I'm sad there are only five in the series and that the author has passed. But what better excuse to read through them again!

Five Stars

Fantastic book!

Disappointing

Self's How the Dead Live was not at all what I was expecting.