Being Dead / Jim Crace

Being Dead, unusually, begins with its main characters lying dead and rotting on a beach. Not, you might think, a promising start. You would be wrong. Equally a study of intimacy as a meditation on the physical progress of death, we are given a strange portrait of a couples' affection as it matures over thirty years, and how it seems to continue into death: ‘quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet’.