Mortality - Tapa dura

Shocking, intimate and astute, Mortality is a memoir like no other * Irish Independent * Witty, thoughtful and refreshingly irritable * Evening Standard * Apart from the obvious sense of denoument, what makes [Hitchens's] last seven essays so potent... is their struggle towards the shattering of illusion... The true struggle of his last writings is to remain himself, deep in the country of the ill, for as long as he can. * Observer * Hitchens's traditional strengths - his mastery of irony, his range of reference, his contempt for euphemism - are all in evidence here but there is a timeless, aphoristic quality to these essays that distinguishes them from his writings on politics and literature. * New Statesman * Hitchens's account of his climb to extinction is Larkinesque, and not only because his sentences stay in the mind as firmly as good poetry. * Literary Review * Characteristic of his elegant wit: philosophical, literary, ironic, sardonic, reflective and resentful * The Times * Mortality by Christopher Hitchens is an inspiring, astonishingly candid and ultimately heartbreaking account of one man's battle with cancer. And not just any man... a brilliant contrary mind, wonderful writer, world-class debater and extremely dangerous luncher. This book, featuring the articles he wrote for Vanity Fair while he was dying, will make you laugh, fume and cry in equal measure. -- Piers Morgan * Mail on Sunday Books of the Year * A trenchant, learned, iconoclastic and splendidly witty commentator on public life and, as here, on his own private triumphs and travails... unremittingly elegant, a master of graceful prose -- John Banville [Hitchens's] voice remains civilised, searching and ready to vanquish all his enemies -- Colm Tobin His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater's famous phrase, he burned 'with this hard gem-like flame.' Right to the end. -- Ian McEwan

During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing the ability to speak. Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.