Actor James Norton brings a sense of gentle longing to this tale of an octogenarian looking back on the life he’s departed
The latest novel from the Reasons to Stay Alive author Matt Haig begins with an octogenarian man having a heart attack. Former business magnate Wilbur Budd is already feeling a bit peculiar when he receives a phone call from his ex-wife, Maggie, who he hasn’t heard from in years. “I wanted to hear your voice,” she tells him wistfully. Minutes after getting off the phone, Wilbur collapses on his front lawn and dies.
What sounds like the end of a story is, in fact, the beginning as Wilbur finds himself standing on a train platform with his mind “reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash”. A train arrives and a woman disembarks and introduces herself as Agnes. She is, she says, the ghost of a bookseller who once ran a shop Wilbur visited as a child. She will be guiding him in a voyage through his past, pausing at formative moments including his brother’s premature death and Wilbur and Maggie’s honeymoon in Venice. “This is death,” Agnes tells him. “Where your life flashes before your eyes. This is how it happens. Fast and slow. Like life … ”
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