Dying
A Memoir
Cory Taylor
“For so many of us, death has become the unmentionable thing, a monstrous silence. But this is no help to the dying, who are probably lonelier now than they’ve ever been.”
Available as Paperback, eBook
Written in the final months of her life, Cory Taylor’s Dying is a deeply moving meditation on death, and a joyful and wise tribute to life
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 STELLA PRIZE
In the year before her death, as she struggled with an untreatable illness, Cory Taylor began to write about her experiences, the patterns of her life, and of those she had lost. Dying is about vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, and anger. It is also about the acceptance that it takes to live a good life and say goodbye to it in peace.
“Unsparing in its insights and observations, breathtaking in its courage and generosity. A thing of lightness and beauty”
guardian
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“Serves as a reminder, amid the omnishambles of today’s world, that life is transient and death final … Her luminous voice, touching on the fragility of life, the randomness of death … is one worth listening to”
the Times
“An unflinching exploration into the experience, culture and language of dying … There is courage in abundance here. She looked death in the eye and, in her final months, produced a work that will help the rest of us approach our own demise with greater understanding, integrity and insight”
observer
“The book rings louder in my imagination the more time I spend apart from it … Taylor’s prose is clear and direct, with flashes of surpassing loveliness … it has a startling offhand grace”
new York Times
“A manual for the discussion of death, full of wisdom, vulnerability and reassurance … For all of Cory Taylor’s acceptance of the inevitable, Dying contains a will to live on, and a conviction that for as long as we are remembered, we remain present”
times Literary Supplement
Cory Taylor
Cory Taylor is the author of two celebrated novels: Me and Mr Booker, which was a regional winner in the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and My Beautiful Enemy which in 2014 was shortlisted for Australia’s premier prize for fiction, the Miles Franklin Award. She died in July 2016. In 2017, Dying was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.
