Mortality

Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers.

The starting point of this book was when Christopher Hitchens found he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady'. Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of cancer treatment, enduring huge levels of suffering and eventually losing the power of speech.

Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease and the climax of a lifetime's work of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this confrontation with mortality Hitchens writes eloquently of his fear of losing the ability to write, of the joy of conversation, of the torture of chemotherapy . . . and of the very meaning of life.

About the Author

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), 'one of the most prolific, and well as brilliant, journalists of our time' (Observer), was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York. The most recent of his numerous books are the international bestsellers God is Not Great, Hitch-22 and Arguably.