Large print book
Should we stay or should we go : a novel / Lionel Shriver.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780063118904
- Physical Description: 386 pages ; 23 cm
- Edition: Large print edition.
- Publisher: New York : Harper Large Print, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2021]
- Copyright: ©2021.
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Married people > Fiction. Older people > Fiction. Suicide pacts > Fiction. Choice (Psychology) > Fiction. Large type books. |
Available copies
- 5 of 5 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at Rossland Public Library.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 5 total copies.
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rossland Public Library | FIC SHR (Text) | 35162001017042 | Large Print | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2021 April #2
*Starred Review* Watching their elderly parents die painful, undignified deaths, Kay and Cyril Wilkinson find themselves contemplating what their own future might hold. Cyril is a respected physician with Britain's NIH; Kay, is a competent, if not passionate, nurse. With ready access to the proper drugs, Cyril proposes a pact: on the evening of Kay's eightieth birthday, several decades hence, they will down a handful of pills and end things on their own terms. That their plan intersects with the UK's Brexit debacle and the COVID-19 pandemic makes it sharply ironic. Call this Shriver's "13 Ways of Looking at Mortality," for in each of those chapters she hits the reset button to imagine all the ways Cyril's scheme might conceivably play out: One spouse dies, one doesn't; fate intervenes via random traffic accidents; the Wilkinsons chose to live, then either luxuriate in a posh seniors' enclave or struggle in a depressing elder warehouse. Confronting one's own demise is always a daunting exercise, but for those with more miles behind them than ahead, the notion of controlling one's exit strategy can be an intriguing diversion from the humiliations of illness, infirmity, and irrelevance. An acute and wily satirist, Shriver handles a delicate subject with wry humor, reassuring sensitivity, and bracing realism. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2021 May #1
Is it a good idea to kill yourself before you become elderly and burdensome? Shriver considers the possibilities. After 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. 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. So they agree that on Kay's 80th birthday, in 2020, they'll take fatal doses of Seconal. In successive chapters, Shriver imagines a dozen ways this plan plays out, or doesn't. Kay has second thoughts and is struck dead by a delivery van anyhow; or Cyril does and meets a similarly dim fate. 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. More wildly, Shriver imagines scenarios in which a drug for immortality is discovered or the couple enter a cryogenic deep-freeze and reemerge to a transformed human race or suffer in a dystopian England overrun by migrants. Shriver is still Shriver, using her characters to grumble about Brexit, Covid, monetary policy, and political correctness. ("Please tell me you're not listening to that Shriver woman," Kay groans to Cyril. "She's a hysteric. And so annoyingly smug, as if she wants civilization to collapse.") But a novel with multiple tendrils means she doesn't get locked into one point of view, and, as in The Post-Birthday World, the multiple perspectives produce a tender and complex portrait of the central couple. Mortality, Shriver finds, needn't be morbid; one of her imagined futures is downright pleasant and testifies to humanity's adaptability. It reads a bit awkwardly, but that'll happen when a writer tries something new. A return to form, merging Shriver's better instincts as both novelist and social critic. Copyright Kirkus 2021 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2021 January
Copyright 2020 Library Journal.New York Times best-selling and famously punch-in-the-gut author Shriver returns with the story of a couple who vow to commit suicide together on the wife's 80th birthday. As the fateful day approaches, they begin to reassess the wisdom of their decision and acknowledge that the frailties of old age are intimately wound up with its gifts. With a 50,000-copy first printing. - LJ Express Reviews : LJ Express Reviews
In 1991, when Kay Wilkinson's father dies after a long decline into dementia, Kay's husband Cyril proposes that they spare themselves, their children, and the National Health Service a similar fate by agreeing to do themselves in when they turn 80. Because Cyril is a little older than Kay, they will wait until her 80th birthday. The years fly by, and suddenly it is 2020. Kay's birthday arrives in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which puts an end to any plans for fond farewells. Instead, the Wilkinsons prepare a favorite dinner, pour some wine, and ready the pills. Will they or won't they go through with it? It doesn't give much away to say that one does and one doesn't. Because no sooner does this particular story reach its conclusion than the rug is pulled out, and a new version with a different ending presents itself. Then comes another version and another and another. Some of these scenarios are hopeful, while others are macabre.
Copyright 2021 LJExpress.VERDICT As an exercise in possibility--how any of us may reach old age and face death--this novel is sometimes prophetic, sometimes preposterous, but never boring.âBarbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2021 April #1
Shriver (
Copyright 2021 Publishers Weekly.The Motion of the Body Through Space ) delivers on a high-concept premise full of alternative narratives based around themes of illness and aging. In 1991, over a "fateful sherry," Londoners Cyril and Kay Wilkinson, both still in perfectly good health, make a pact to end their lives when they turn 80 (she, in 2020; he, in 2021). There is no satire or irony in Cyril's Swiftean "modest proposal," as Shriver terms it. Rather, they're propelled by watching Kay's parents linger through years of dementia, going from "deterioration" to "degradation" toward an intolerable decline that they don't want for themselves. Shriver tackles the next decades until their "use-by" date with her usual aplomb, offering 12 alternate scenarios. (It is not a spoiler to reveal that in some instances they live well beyond their 80s.) Years progress from the "surprising to the implausible" to the "incredible" and the "impossible" as the Wilkinsons balk and consider every possibility from assisted living to cryogenics, debating the free choice to end one's life and the purpose or value of living. There is sometimes outlandish humor and periods of magical thinking in their dialogue, all rendered to brilliant effect. Readers will be entranced by Shriver's freewheeling meditation on mortality and human agency.Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (June)
