As 2019, the year of Cyril’s eightieth birthday, arrives, arguments over Brexit (that ‘pestilent neologism’) rage. The next twelve chapters throw up a series of parallel universes, each exploring a possible future for Kay, Cyril and their three children. Kay ponders, then accepts his proposal and this hilariously inventive tale takes off. He has a stash of deadly pills in a soap box in the fridge. He feels that eighty is about as good as it gets and suggests they commit suicide together when they both reach that age (Kay is a year younger than Cyril). Cyril, contemplating Kay’s dry eyes, argues that ‘for creatures to survive in a state of advanced decay is unnatural’. Kay’s father had Alzheimer’s he was needy, unresponsive and impossible to love for ten years before he died. She is a nurse and he a GP and, although only in their early fifties, they see trouble ahead. It’s 1991 and Kay Wilkinson has just returned from her father’s funeral and is drinking a steadying glass of sherry with her husband, Cyril. ‘I tackle precisely the subjects that everyone yearns to avoid,’ she once declared, and as her latest work of fiction opens, things do seem pretty grim. Surely ones own father passing should never come as such a relief. But if Lionel Shriver had, as she has claimed, ‘an absolute ball writing this book’, then perhaps it’s because she enjoys the dystopian, the dysfunctional and the morbid. One recurrent feature, though, is the mingling of comedy and horror. You might think that when a writer who has been called the ‘Cassandra of American letters’ turns her gaze to old age, physical deterioration and death, the resulting novel would be bleak. L ionel Shriver would hate to be praised for diversity but her novels have always been admirably various.

Lionel shriver should we stay review