Mortality

Whatever your opinion of the late Christopher Hitchens, you can't deny he had a way with words. There was a real weight and intensity to what he said. He may not have always said the right thing but he had the conviction and integrity to stand behind whatever he said. He was a great writer of our times, which makes Mortality a difficult book to read.

It's a cancer memoir. A posthumous cancer memoir at that. Collated from various articles written for journals and magazines about his battle with cancer and with unfinished notes on his final days and an afterword by his wife, this is a powerful, sad, brittle book about mortality and legacy.

Throughout the essays, one thing is clear - Hitchens is concerned with his legacy and what he will leave behind him. He moves from hotel to hotel, new side-effect to new side-effect and describes the processes involved in being one of the living dead, or dead living. He can't quite work out what he is. There is a real weight to his sadness, to his pain and to the changes being enforced on his body and what we're left with is a farewell from one of the most contraversial and oft-quoted thinkers of our time on the very thing that concerns us all - death, and what we did before it.