Delia knows she is dying and wants to make sure everything is in order before she goes, including confronting secrets from her past. The book is interspersed with letters Delia is sent in her role as a household expert which are both funny and sad and help to remind the reader what is important in the big scheme of things. This is a thoroughly absorbing novel, told from Delia’s point of view without self pity or being over sentimental. This author is a great new find and highly recommended.
Inspired by her heroine, Isabella Beeton, Delia has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides, as well as an acerbic domestic advice column. As the book opens, she is not yet forty, but has only a short time to live.
She is preoccupied with how to prepare herself and her family for death, from writing exhaustive lists to teaching her young daughters how to make a perfect cup of tea. What she needs, more than anything, is a manual – exactly the kind she is the expert at writing. Realising this could be her greatest achievement (for who could be better equipped to write The Household Guide to Dying?) she sets to work. But, in the writing, Delia is forced to confront the ghosts of her past, and the events of fourteen years previously. There is a journey she needs to make, back to the landscape of her past, and one last vital thing she needs to do.
Hugely original, life affirming and humorous, The Household Guide to Dying illuminates love, loss, family and the place we call home.
Debra Adelaide is the author of two novels, The Hotel Albatross and Serpent Dust, and the editor of four themed collections of fiction and memoirs, the latest of which is Acts of Dog. She has worked as a researcher, editor and book reviewer, and has a PhD from the University of Sydney. She is now a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.
