Before I Die by Jenny Downham

Price: £7.99
Online Discount: 10.00%
Your Price: £7.19
Availability: Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days.
Add To Basket
EAN: 9780552774628
Format: Paperback
Published: 9 Oct 2008

Synopsis

Tessa has just a few months to live.

Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It's her Ten Things To Do Before I Die list. And Number One is sex.

Released from the constraints of 'normal' life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up.

Tessa's feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa's time finally runs out.

BEFORE I DIE is a brilliantly-crafted novel, heartbreaking yet astonishingly life-affirming. It will take you to the very edge.

What the critics say

Dealing frankly with teenage life, Before I Die will be the year’s most talked-about novel.
- The Sunday Times

A novel that won't fail to touch those who read it...A book that will make you happy to be alive
*****
- Heat

Fierce, bold and bright...Jenny Downham is capable of exquisite, almost fevered writing, but she's also a master of pace, slowly establishing a heroine so brimful of life that it is wrenching to endure the attritions of the final pages
- Observer

Downham has not only eschewed mawkishness, but has managed to convey real feeling. Her heroine - angry, funny and occasionally irrational - positively leaps off the page...This is a thoughtful, and sometimes painful, exploration of what it feels like to say goodbye to life before you have had a chance to live it.
- The Times

The Author

Jenny Downham

Jenny Downham trained as an actor and worked in alternative theatre before starting to write. She lives in London.