Love and Other Near Death Experiences - Softcover

Mil Millinfton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0297851063 ISBN 13: 9780297851066

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006

Synopsis

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 - Not Quite Dead is a jack-knifing comedy about those things which should be no laughing matter.

About this title

About the Author:

Mil Millington has written for various magazines, radio, and The Guardian (he also had a weekly column in the Guardian Weekend magazine). His website has achieved cult status, and he is also a cofounder and cowriter of the online magazine The Weekly. He lives in England's West Midlands with his girlfriend and their two children.

From 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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0297851063
• ISBN 13: 9780297851066
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 345