Loved this autobiographical account of seventeen incidents
in which Maggie O’Farrell had a brush with death. Thoughtful, slightly odd
because of its subject matter, and original. Your first thought is, how strange
because I’ve had no brushes with death, until you remember ‘oh yes there was
the time that…’ and suddenly you too are wondering, what if? From her near miss with a wandering hiker who
went on tragically to murder another young woman, to an attack by two unknown men
on her stationary car, or a childhood illness that immobilised her for months, or
a rash decision to jump into deep water; they are stories beautifully told. And
gradually a life unfolds, woven into the mesh of these random happenings, in
which truth is just as unnerving as fiction. Maggie O'Farrell at her best.
