On Christmas Eve, a family has gathered around the table for the obligatory dinner. The father, once an imposing figure who terrorized his children, has suddenly fallen prey to Parkinson’s. Yesterday’s tyrant is now trapped inside a disintegrating body. André, the eldest child, is nearing 60. He has never loved the father who lied too much, abused too much, manipulated too much. But still, this holiday week, André cannot help but be moved. How should he behave toward a parent to whom all pleasures are forbidden? Should he struggle to prolong the old man’s life, or help him end it? Around the dinner table, opinions are divided. At once intimate and universal,
A Good Death is a deeply moving voyage into the essence of humanity. In it, Gil Courtemanche once again asks readers to confront the question that lay at the heart of his first novel: Why live? Why die?
Over de auteur
Gil Courtemanche is a journalist, essayist and novelist based in Montréal, Quebec. His best-selling first novel,
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, was an international sensation; it has been translated into many languages, sold in over twenty countries and made into a film.
Wayne Grady, one of Canada’s foremost popular science writers, has won three Science in Society awards from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. In 2004 he collaborated with David Suzuki on
Tree: A Life Story, a best-seller now in its third printing. He is the author of eight books of non-fiction, translated eight novels and edited six anthologies of short stories.