Count Your Breakfasts

Death’s Apprentice

Death is only where it stands to look from.

In February, on the frost of a windscreen in a hospital car park, she finds a mark nobody has taught her: two circles, one above the other, and a line between them. She has been three months at his side by then, in corridors, watching, and she has not been given a room of her own.

What follows is her first year. Twenty rooms, and what she saw in them, and what she did not understand, which she kept in a separate column. She has a pencil. She has hands that go through things. She has been told her job is to be of no use, and she is learning what that costs.

Then the book opens a second door and goes outside. A week in September on a Scottish ben, four hillwalkers, a river to cross and a ridge to get over, and the old Death walking behind them saying very little.

This is not a book about death. It is a book about living.

48,156 words, a full-length read. Available as ebook and paperback.