The Household Guide to Dying
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- € 9,49
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- € 9,49
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A moving novel, charting a dying woman’s attempts to prepare her family for the future. For fans of Maggie O’Farrell and Audrey Niffenegger.
Inspired by her heroine, Isabella Beeton, Delia has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides. As the book opens, she is not yet forty, but has only a short time to live.
Preoccupied with how to prepare herself and her family for death, Delia realizes that what she really needs, more than anything, is a manual. Realising this could be her greatest achievement, she sets to work. But, in the writing, Delia is forced to confront the ghosts of her past.
Hugely original, life affirming and humorous, The Household Guide to Dying illuminates love, loss and the place we call home.
Reviews
'Adelaide's moving novel captures both the hope and sadness of Delia's plight.' Daily Mail
‘Darkly comic novel with a tone that is Desperate Housewives meets Six Feet Under…this is caustic and hilarious, as well as heart-warming. A clever read that stays with you for a long time.' Red
'A novel about loving and grieving…filled with humour, warmth and sadness – just like life.' Good Reading
About the author
Debra Adelaide is the author of two novels which were published in Australia and four themed collections of fiction and memoirs. She has worked as a researcher, editor and book reviewer, and has a PhD from the University of Sydney. She is now a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has three children and several chickens.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Domestic advice columnist Delia is terminally ill, but she has a few loose ends she'd like to wrap up before cancer takes her from her husband and two daughters in Australian novelist Adelaide's ho-hum latest. Though Delia makes lists that encompass everything from the morning routine to planning her daughters' weddings, hoping to control what will come after she is gone, much of what is on her mind is her distant past in the small town of Amethyst, where she lived after she left home at 17 to raise her firstborn. Adelaide metes that portion out slowly, and readers will have figured out the twists long before she gets there. What Delia faces and remembers about her time in Amethyst leaves her better able to face gracefully her own imminent departure, which she chronicles in an advice book. That project leads to some off-kilter scenes (such as Delia observing an autopsy and casket shopping), and though the book ends sweetly, Delia's distant narrative tone and the erratic time line rob the tale of emotional impact.
