A Beginner's Guide to Dying

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Lessons for all of us in how to approach life—from someone in the process of dying. • "Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality." —Hospice Nurse Julie McFadden, author of Nothing to Fear

In his mid-40s, aid worker Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer—it had been caught too late, and spread throughout his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live—optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritizing what really matters in life. Deemed “a funny, touching meditation on death” by the Sunday Times, this warm and wise book offers lessons for all of us in how to approach life.

The advice includes: “Do get in touch, but don’t just turn up unaccounted,” and “Do listen, but don’t minimize things.” And just as wisely: “to exist is to have won the lottery of life.”

This remarkable book, a runaway bestseller in the UK, is not just a meditation on dying, but also a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying is destined to become a modern classic.

Simon Boas was born in 1977 and spent his childhood in London and Winchester. He spent his career working for development charities across the globe as well as the UN. At 46, he was diagnosed with advanced throat cancer. In the year following, he wrote pieces about happiness and illness for his local paper, which went viral, encouraging him to expand. A Beginner's Guide to Dying is the result.