It was interesting reading this book so soon after Exit by Belinda Bauer as both books deal with issues surrounding end of live/suicide/euthanasia. In this book a married couple, who in their fifties have to deal with the terrible decline in physical and mental health of their parents, make a pact to perform a joint suicide on their 80th birthday (or the wife’s 80th as she is a year younger than the husband).
The book then follows a ‘sliding doors’ pattern of exploring various different possibilities of how this might play out in reality – whether one or other (or both) of them pulls out of the pact, and what happens next, or what if they go through with it, or something else….
If I’d have known that this was the structure of the book, I probably wouldn’t have read it, because usually I don’t like this messing with the fourth wall type of storytelling, but actually I thought it was amazing (in a good way!).
Strangely, seeing the different possible endings of these people’s lives made me get to know them and care about them really deeply and even though I guessed how the book would end, that didn’t annoy me because it just felt so right.
Sarah Wray Writer 