In 1995, at the age of 42, Robert McCrum suffered a near-fatal stroke, the subject of his acclaimed memoir My Year Off. Ever since, he's been aware of his own mortality. Now, 21 years on, his friends are joining him. Death has become his contemporaries’ every third thought. With the words of his favorite authors as travel companions, this book takes a journey through a year, toward death itself. In a world where we have learned to live well at all costs, can we make peace with what Freud calls "the necessity of dying?" Deeply personal yet always universal, both guide and companion, this is a book for anyone who finds themselves preoccupied by matters of life and death.