With elements of The Wizard of Oz, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Lovely Bones, The Things We Learn When We're Dead shows how small decisions can have profound and unintended consequences, and how sometimes we can get a second chance.
On the way home from a dinner party, Lorna Love steps into the path of an oncoming car. When she wakes up she is in what appears to be a hospital - but a hospital in which her nurse looks like a young Sean Connery, she is served wine for supper, and everyone avoids her questions. It soon transpires that she is in Heaven, or on HVN. Because HVN is a lost, dysfunctional spaceship, and God the aging hippy captain. She seems to be there by accident... Or does God have a higher purpose after all?
At first Lorna can remember nothing. As her memories return - some good, some bad - she realises that she has decision to make and that maybe she needs to find a way home.
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[At the end of her Edinburgh street, where it joined a busier road, was a security camera perched high on a metal pole]***
(Accent Press, 26 January 2017, review copy provided by the author and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is my first time reading the author.
I thought the book was original, well-written, funny and sad at the same time. I absolutely loved it.
The Things We Learn When We're Dead offers a unique and original concept. I loved the idea of heaven being a lost spaceship, wandering galaxies. I loved that God was an odd, ageing hippie.
I loved the way the novel is structured, moving between Lorna's life on the spaceship HVN and important events from her past leading up to the moment of her death. I tend to enjoy books with this kind of non-linear structure and it works really well here.
I loved the way the novel is structured, moving between Lorna's life on the spaceship HVN and important events from her past leading up to the moment of her death. I tend to enjoy books with this kind of non-linear structure and it works really well here.
This is the kind of book it's easy to get lost in and I didn't want it to end.
