Elsewhere, they decide to play out their dotage in a spendy retirement home, or their children discover the plan and have the couple banished to a dismal institution. Kay has second thoughts and is struck dead by a delivery van anyhow or Cyril does and meets a similarly dim fate. In successive chapters, Shriver imagines a dozen ways this plan plays out, or doesn’t. So they agree that on Kay’s 80th birthday, in 2020, they’ll take fatal doses of Seconal. In 1991, Kay, an interior designer, and Cyril, a physician with Britain's National Health Service, are dispirited by the death of Kay’s father from dementia. Is it a good idea to kill yourself before you become elderly and burdensome? Shriver considers the possibilities.Īfter more than a decade of often sour, scolding fiction, Shriver has written her best novel since The Post-Birthday World (2007), in no small part because it revisits that book’s alternate-timeline conceit.
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