Hub_98 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi

Andy Remic’s Kell’s Legend - Book One of the Clockwork Vampire Chronicles is out now from Angry Robot. See www.angryrobotbooks.com for further details

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REVIEWS

The Language of Dying

reviewed by anthony leigh by Sarah Pinborough

PS Publishing

£12 (hardcover), £25 (jacketed hardcover)

Sarah Pinborough is best known for her horror fiction. She’s had four mass market paperbacks published through the US Leisure imprint, and a number of short stories through various markets. In the UK, her only novel to date is a Torchwood tie-in, though at 50,000 words it’s a bit of a stretch to label it as a novel. It’s at the upper end of the novella range.

The Language of Dying is another novella, though this time published as such through the UK’s leading independent publisher, PS Publishing. It’s a marked diversion for Pinborough in terms of both style and subject matter, who admitted that she was worried about the book’s reception as it is so different to the rest of her work to date.

She needn’t have worried. The Language of Dying is one of the finest works I have read this year. As a collector with far more unread books than time will ever allow, it is unusual for me to re-read a book these days. I finished reading The Language of Dying on the train on my way into work, and started reading it again the same evening. It’s that good.

It’s difficult to justify the inclusion of its review in a genre magazine, as it’s not really a genre title. There’s a unicorn, certainly (as you can see from the cover), but the unicorn is a metaphor for loss and new beginnings. It’s not a novel full of magic and wonder, except for the magic and wonder of language, and of families, and of relationships and of resilience.

The book tells the story of a woman and of the last few days of her father’s life as his body gradually gives in to the inevitable decay of cancer. The woman brings her siblings together to say goodbye to the father that raised them alone when their mother discovered that she really wasn’t much of a mother, after all.

There are tales within the tale, histories half-remembered and histories best left forgotten. They’re important, but not the point of the book. The point of the book is that it paints a very real picture of what it feels like to be part of a family (albeit one that is dissolving at the same time as the cancer dissolves the only common ground the family shares); it paints a picture of death; most of all, it paints a picture of life - of hope, of ambition, of love, of loss, of grief, of just-having-to-get-through.

This is easily the best thing Pinborough has ever had published, and a great promise of things to come. Absolute, wholehearted recommendation.

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