Critiques en avant-première

A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture

Picture it: a world, post-pandemic (not our pandemic). In a rush to save humanity, people are flat packed like pieces of Ikea furniture. But later, it's discovered that the flatpack humans are toxic when unpacked: their off-gassing kills. In this parallel universe created by Robert ("This guy knows what he's doing." - Zadie Smith) McGill, a market for these flat packed humans emerges on the dark market...

So begins A Suitable Companion for the End of your Life.

Distraught and hopeless, eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. Ordering a flatpack off the Dark Web will accomplish that and provide a companion for her last days. Enter Ülle.

Flatpacks are supposed to have amnesia, but Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat the deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan’s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet – permanently.

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone.

"Gripping from the first page, Robert McGill's A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death." -Ian Williams, author of Reproduction

"Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion's sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and completely original, this is a propulsive, rewarding, and thought-provoking read." -Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square

​​"The guy knows what he's doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you." - Zadie Smith, author of NW

"A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects." - Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist

"A writer of striking talent and originality." - Daily Mail on The Mysteries

"McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live." - Observer on The Mysteries