by Greg Baxter

In his early thirties, Greg Baxter found himself in a strange place.  He hated his job, he was drinking excessively, he was sabotaging his most important relationships, and he was no longer doing the thing he cared about most: writing.  Strangest of all, at this time he started teaching evening classes in creative writing - and his life changed utterly.

A Preperation for Death is a document of the chaos and discovery of that time and of the experiences that led Greg Baxter to that strange place - an extraordinarily intimate account of literary failure (and its consequences), personal decay, and redemption through reading, writing, and truth-telling.  Studded with vivid, loving portraits of the people closest to him - his Austrian grandmother, who narrowly survived the Second World War; his mother and father, both described with heartbreakingly close attention; and his cousin Walter, whose own demons provide a striking counterpoint to the author's - it is above all a stunningly vivid and searching self-portrait: possibly the most honest book you'll ever read.

'Writing is a preperation for death, and Greg Baxter's book is a remarkably vivid and admirably unvarnished confrontation with that irreducible fact.  He's a gifted storyteller; A Preparation for Death is never less than compelling.' David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

'This is an occasionally infuriating and completely wonderful book.  I read it in one sitting, delighted by its ferocity' Anne Enright

'Here, out of a Jiffy bag sent on spec, is one of the best books I've read this year. .. This is not a book about redemption or epiphany.  There is light at the end, but it is still around a corner.  The book is not about a triumph from disaster; the book is the triumph.' John Self, Asylum

'It is through this bold self-exploration that Baxter finds his feet and establishes a certainty of place, reaching a raw, distressed beauty of its own in the writing.  The triumph is in the steely courage it takes to put a life down with such uncompromising clarity.' Hugo Hamilton, The Irish Times