How the Dead Live was published by Bloomsbury in 2000. Lily Bloom — an Australian Jewish woman who has lived in London for decades — dies of cancer and finds herself in Dulston, a dreary London suburb that serves as the afterlife. Death, it transpires, is not oblivion or transcendence but continuation: the dead carry on much as before, inhabiting their familiar neuroses, grudges, and unfulfilled desires in a landscape of shabby terraces and municipal parks.
Lily is accompanied by the Lithy — embodiments of the lives she didn’t live, the selves she might have been — who cling to her as parasitic manifestations of regret. Her guide is Phar Lap Jones, a dead Aboriginal Australian who navigates the afterlife’s bureaucracy with weary competence. The dead world has its own economy, its own social hierarchies, its own petty tyrannies — all of them recognizably continuous with life rather than distinct from it.
Self’s afterlife is not supernatural but psychological: death is the state in which everything you avoided confronting in life becomes inescapable. Lily must finally reckon with her failed marriage, her ambivalent motherhood, her addiction (the dead can still use drugs, though with diminished returns), and her fundamental inability to live authentically. The novel’s tone is simultaneously comic and devastating — Lily’s acerbic narration never softens into sentimentality, and Self refuses to offer redemption or closure.
Collecting How the Dead Live
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 2000): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25