A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a shortlisted book for the 30th Annual Hamilton Literary Fiction Award, taking a bold and absurd approach to the dystopian plague novel. The story follows an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, who decides to end her life. However, she meets Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who inadvertently helps her fulfill her wish. As Ülle begins to remember her past, she becomes concerned about keeping both herself and Ülle alive, while a shadowy organization tries to silence them. The book explores boundaries, survival, and the drive to live.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 220 pages
Publication date: 28 July 2022
Publisher: Coach House Books

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is 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 she'll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan's wish come true. But Ülle 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 Regan's house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle 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 McGill's A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaids Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death. –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction.

Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion's sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and .

Weight: 262g
Dimension: 133 x 208 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781552454442