A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life
By (Author) Robert McGill
By (author) Robert McGill
Coach House Books
Coach House Books
20th September 2022
Canada
General
Fiction
813.6
Paperback
220
Width 127mm, Height 203mm, Spine 15mm
2022 QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture
Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And shell do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter lle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regans wish come true.
But lle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regans house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both lle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet permanently.
A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone.
"Gripping from the first page, Robert McGills A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaids TaleReproduction
"Terrifying and tender, A Suitable CompanionBellevue Square
The guy knows what hes doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you. Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time
A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects. Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist
A writer of striking talent and originality. Daily Mail on The Mysteries
McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live. Observer on The Mysteries
"This is one of those strange little gems that you finish in two or three sittings and never really forget. Opening with apparent surrealism (protagonist Regan ordering an illicit "flatpacked" human being to keep her company during the final days before her suicide) McGill's novel proceeds outward, fleshing out its strange-yet-familiar world until the premise makes perfect sense. Regan is characterized memorably through McGill's excellent sense for detail. Meanwhile, the story of her new companion unfolds through interstitial chapters, starting long ago in a distant land and drawing ever closer to the book's present. The two threads meet in an ending that doesn't surprise or subvert, but simply stuns with the power of its delivery." Graham Overby, Next Chapter Booksellers
"A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is strange, compelling science fiction about empathy and survival."Aimee Jodoin, Forward reviews, Book of the Day
"Zany goings-on in a seriocomic dystopia, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is also a pleasantly oddball exploration of second chances and chosen family." Brett Josef Grubisic, The Toronto Star
"Robert McGills new novel, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life, has a doozy of a premise. What if people could be flat-packed into boxes like cheaply made furniture" Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
"A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Lifediscusses mental health, parental relationships during a pandemic and the hardships of being a teenager. There couldnt be a better time for the release of this novel, as we slowly move beyond our own pandemic and assess our scars." Megan Hatton,The White Wall Review
Robert McGills writing has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines includingThe Atlantic,The Dublin Review,Hazlitt, andThe Walrus. He teaches at the University of Toronto. His previous books include two novels,The MysteriesandOnce We Had a Country, and two nonfiction books,The Treacherous ImaginationandWar Is Here. Visit him at robert-mcgill.com.