Death & Dying

Professor Alice Roberts combines archaeological finds with cutting-edge DNA research and written history to shed fresh light on how people lived: by examining the stories of the dead....

The Reverend Richard Coles's deeply personal account of life after grief will resonate, unforgettably, with anyone who has lost a loved one....

At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer....

In this inspiring masterpiece, best-selling author Susan Cain shows the power of 'bittersweetness'—a tendency towards sorrow and longing, an acute awareness of passing time and a piercing joy when beholding beauty....

Random House presents the audiobook edition of All That Remains by Professor Sue Black, read by the author....

We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared....

An oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem....

Ten percent of people whose hearts stop and then restart report near-death experiences. When Dr Bruce Greyson's patients started describing events that he simply could not dismiss, he began to investigate....

From her first day at Westwind Cremation & Burial, 23-year-old Caitlin Doughty threw herself into her curious new profession....

Here is a contemporary spiritual masterpiece and source of sacred inspiration that interprets Tibetan Buddhism for the West....

And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence....

Dame Sue Black es una de las científicas forenses más reconocidas del mundo y se enfrenta a la muerte todos los días: analiza...

Dear Life is the inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking and yet deeply uplifting story of the doctor we would all want to have by our side in a crisis. The hospice where Rachel works is, of course, a world haunted by loss and grief, but it is also teeming with life....

In the tradition of Randall Munroe's What if?, Doughty blends her scientific understanding of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious and candid answers to more than 50 urgent questions posed by her youngest fans....

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards....

What exactly are the weird and the eerie? In this new essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes....

Imagine you are dying with a secret. Something you've never had the courage to tell your friends and family. Or a last wish - a task you need carried out before you can rest in peace....

An incredible memoir from one of the world's most eminent heart surgeons, with some of the most remarkable and poignant cases he's worked on....

The end of a life can often feel like a traumatic, chaotic and inhuman experience. In this reassuring and inspiring book, palliative care physician Dr BJ Miller and writer Shoshana Berger provide a vision for rethinking and navigating this universal process....

Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced - at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose....

Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well....

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' groundbreaking On Death and Dying changed the way we talk about the end of life. Now On Grief and Grieving will profoundly influence the way we experience the process of grief....

A belief in the afterlife is common to almost every faith and culture around the world. Even people who don't consider themselves spiritual share a fascination in life after death....

Causes of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age and where famine could be just one bad harvest away....

Medical historian Dr Suzie Edge examines 1,000 years of royal deaths to present a humorous deep-dive into the varied—and oft-gruesome—deaths of the king and queens of England and Scotland....

Evelyn Amdur, a hospice social worker, began to write these stories midway through her career, collaborating with her daughter, Shelley. Many traditional cultures have a custom of "death songs", which rest on the idea that at one's last moment, one somehow sums up the essence of one's life in a phrase or a song. Woven into these stories are instructions on how to die well, not only in what spirit we face death itself, but also through instructions on what is necessary to prepare our families, to ready our estates, and to manage all the players who may be involved in our deaths.  

Why do we embalm the deceased? Why are funerals so expensive? Is there a reason coffins are shaped the way they are? Where does the tradition of viewing the body come from? Ceremonies for honoring the deceased are crucial parts of our lives, but few people know where our traditional practices come from—and what they reveal about our history, culture, and beliefs about death. In Last Rites, author Todd Harra takes listeners on a fascinating exploration of American funeral customs—exploring where they came from, what they mean, and how they are still evolving. 

Following Kate Marshall’s first year in the mortuary at a north of England NHS hospital, with each month exploring the people she meets, in life and death, as well as her own growing awareness of life behind the veil. Sorry for Your Loss is haunting, uplifting and informative, with many moments of laughter, and shows us that the way we approach death can make life all the more precious.

British writer William Hazlitt was the most brilliant essayist of his day. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. During his last illness, Hazlitt wrote this essay on a topic that most people will recognize. Hazlitt did not fear his own demise, and in this thoughtful essay, he explains why no one needs to give in to such a fear.

Funerary rituals show us what people thought about mortality; how they felt about loss; what they believed came next. From Roman cremations and graveside feasts, to deviant burials with heads rearranged, from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales, Buried provides an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain.