Coming Soon: This is How People Die

Scoot isn’t supposed to be here. Hannah has DNR tattooed above failing lungs. As cystic fibrosis patients secluded in a modern sanitarium in the old downtown of Charleston, South Carolina, they’ve outlived their expiration dates—and every other expectation that comes with being alive. Here, living “the Salt Life” means nebulizing saline solution, and coughing is a form of revival. There is no cure and too many kinds of medicine. But these are not people who die quietly.

When Hannah leaves behind a “dare of sorts” as her will and testament—knowing Scoot would follow her to hell and back because it’s easier than the tyranny of a waiting room—he’s in. Like a covert operative from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Scoot leaps from a Paris museum haunted by George Sand and the Romantics to a Polish cathedral, sledgehammer in hand, where he will steal the heart of Frédéric Chopin with a mysterious new partner in crime—and then to the liminal edge of Tbilisi, Georgia, where Europe and Asia collide and agents from the CIA, GRU, Interpol, Hannah’s past, and the literary underground Oulipo converge on his trail.

Told in singular, fever-bright prose, This Is How People Die is a mind-bending novel of love, vengeance, deliverance, espionage, and murder—an absurd and luminous journey from mere survival to the fragile art of being human. Not everyone dies at the end of their story. Some never die at all. Others will wish they had.