The Invention of Dying

A doctor, her bats, some remote islands, their expectant people: THE INVENTION OF DYING is a novel about human curiosity and reinvention; an exploration of the arrival of medicine where medicine has never been before, the discovery of possibilities for bright new life when confronted with the darkness of our own mortality. The Invention of Dying is all about the taming of death, one bold living day at a time. "THE INVENTION OF DYING hums with a rare verbal and narrative energy. This is a book that will take you to places both real and imaginary that you've never been before. Its range is encyclopedic and the great comic spirit of Brooke Biaz is never far away." -Jon Cook, Professor of Literature & Director of the Centre of Creative & Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia "Brooke Biaz here presents a cleverly and even musically worded game, that plays with the relationship between medicine and death. In a day when perfectly healthy people are regularly made miserable by being told that they have "risk factors" and require intense, burdensome medical surveillance to ward off death-a death that will come eventually regardless-a way to shake up some of our ideas about the role of medicine, and even to imagine what life might be like without doctors or hospitals, is very timely." -Howard Brody, John P. McGovern Centennial Chair and Director, Institute for the Medical Humanities, The University of Texas Medical Branch BROOKE BIAZ (aka GRAEME HARPER) is a fiction writer, scriptwriter, and critic. Editor-in-chief of the international journal, NEW WRITING, he is a Professor of Creative Writing, Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan, and an Honorary Professor in England. A former Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing, and a National Book Council award winner, he received the first doctorate in Creative Writing awarded in Australia. He was the inaugural Chair of the Higher Education Committee at the United Kingdom's National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE).