The Household Guide to Dying (Debra Adelaide, Picador, $32.95 tpb, ISBN 9780330424257, June) ****

Delia Bennet offers domestic advice for a living, is the author of the popular ‘Household Guide’ series, and she is dying of cancer. Using her experience of dying as fodder, Delia embarks upon writing her final book. It is the ultimate self-help manual, providing practical and positive advice on dying based on personal experience, and it is the final in the ‘Household Guide’ series: The Household Guide to Dying. While writing and researching the book Delia is drawn back to the small town of Amethyst to revisit her earlier life, and things left unfinished. Debra Adelaide’s third novel is an accomplished and moving story that manages to avoid descending into glibness or sentimentality while offering plenty of surprises to the reader. ‘Dear Delia’ letters are interspersed with quotes from the book and moments of black humour and poignancy, as past and present meet. At times the movement between past and present isn’t always evident but this is a minor quibble, as the author has deftly brouht this story to life in an entertaining and highly original way, while expertly weaving its many strands into a fine novel. The Household Guide to Dying will appeal to readers of well-written contemporary women’s fiction.

Deborah Crabtree is a Melbourne-based fiction writer and bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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