Deathday (Paperback or Softback)

England in 2045, a country where euthanasia is not just legal but compulsory. Severe economic depression in the wake of the Great Pandemic and Brexit, a collapse in the care system and inter-generational conflict had changed attitudes to death and old age. Ten years earlier, a right-wing Government supported by the shadowy League of Youth had won a majority in Parliament for the mandatory termination of life at the age of ninety.

A decade later, people who still accept the law plan for ‘Deathday Parties’, ‘Evaders’ try to escape abroad, and ‘Remainders’, people already over ninety and who were spared at the time the law came in, live in colonies in rundown seaside resorts. Meanwhile, the young King plots with politicians opposed to the laws which are enforced by the sinister National Age Regulation Authority.

Will the law be changed? Will the League of Youth still hold sway over the politicians? Who will live and who will die? But the overriding questions remain. Quality of life versus length of life. The right to die versus the sanctity of life. And the rights of the young versus the rights of the old.

Deathday by Colin Philpott is the author's first work of fiction. Previously, he has written three books about twentieth-century history. 'A Place in History'- the stories of places in Britain touched by news events; 'Relics of the Reich' - examines how Germany has dealt with the buildings left by the Nazis; and 'Secret Wartime Britain' - about hidden places in Britain that helped the war effort in the Second World War. Colin worked for the BBC for twenty-five years as a journalist, programme-maker and senior executive. Later he was Director of the National Media Museum in Bradford. He lives in Yorkshire.