About the Book

Like a lot of people today, I don’t believe in a god. This leaves Sundays nice and free, but provides limited consolation when death comes to call. After our 21-year-old son Jack was killed crossing a road in Italy, I felt I needed to know all I might about my nemesis; how ancestors had approached death, what insights artists and philosophers have offered, and how our contemporaries view mortality, especially those who have had a very close brush with their own demise. These investigations set me to wonder: if death is the end of life, what exactly is life? The biosciences and physics give us some tantalizing clues and in following these I – and the book – are led to some very surprising conclusions.

by Dave Marteau

I have worked with and for those close to death for 30 years in several settings (including hospitals, a drug rehab and a hospice). Following the death of our 21-year-old son Jack, grief drove me to know everything I possibly could about death. I spent the next five years researching mortality from every conceivable angle, and then put all I found together in the hope that it might offer some comfort and hope to the newly bereaved.