Love and Other Near Death Experiences
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- 45,00 kr
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- 45,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
A fantastically funny, bittersweet story of second guesses and second chances.
Rob Garland is getting married in two months. Oddly, however, this is the least of his problems. More vexing than the seating arrangements, the choice of wedding stationery - more even that the savagely obscene expense of everything - is the fact that Rob should be dead: and he knows it.
Faced with an ultimatum from his girlfriend to either sort himself out, or call the wedding (and the whole relationship) off, he sets about trying to come to terms with how it is that, somehow, he's still inexplicably breathing. After pouring his heart out to the listeners on his late-night radio jazz show, he soon finds himself teamed up with others who really ought not to be alive, but who - for random, meaningless and, frankly, stupid reasons - unaccountably are. And that's when things become yet more worrying: because it turns out that their search to understand why they've each remained oddly alive might very well end up killing them all.
Love, death, religious beliefs, existential angst - Love and Other Near-Death Experiences is a jack-knifing comedy about those things which should be no laughing matter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weird, in a good way, defines the spirited amalgam of madcap romanticism, mordant spirituality and oddball adventure that infuses British writer Millington's third novel (A Certain Chemistry; Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About). Rob Garland's life is decidedly unsettled. He's dithering about his upcoming nuptials. He's bored at the radio station where he hosts a late-night jazz show. And by all odds he ought to be dead, except that a quick errand, coupled with an infuriating traffic tie-up, makes him late for lunch with a musician who is among those immolated when a tanker truck plows into the restaurant. After Garland forsakes his playlist one night to rant about his near-death experience, he finds himself at the center of a circle of like survivors, including a brawny American soldier who escaped death in war-torn Bosnia and an addled British schoolteacher who left her Bulgarian hotel in search of cigarettes and returned to find it in flames. There are times when this off-in-all-directions novel explodes into the edgily surreal, and its intense Britishness may confound some readers. But the audacious originality of Millington's witty plot and the energy of his crisp, comic dialogue are wholly engaging.
