It isn’t quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’. But it’s close to ‘Don’t start any long books’.

In his mid-40s, Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer – it had been caught too late, and spread around his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live – optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritising what really matters in life.

InA Beginner’s Guide to DyingSimon considers and collates the things that have given him such a great sense of peace and contentment, and why dying at 46 really isn’t so bad. And for that reason it’s also only partly about ‘dying’. It is mostly a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life, and why giving death a place can help all of us make even more of it.