It isn’t quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’. But it’s close to ‘Don’t start any long books’. In his mid-40s, Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer, it had been caught too late and spread around his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritising what really matters in life. In A Beginner’s Guide to DyingA Simon considers and collates the things that have given him such a great sense of peace and contentment, and why dying at 46 really isn’t so bad. And for that reason it’s also only partly about ‘dying’. It is mostly a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life, and why giving death a place can help all of us make even more of it.
