I have an enormous amount of time for what Sally Nicholls does. I’ve just gone through my previous reviews of hers and there’s not a one that I haven’t found something incredibly valuable and resonant within. There’s something in her incredible grace and eloquence that feels so rich for me, and I am eternally happy to discover work of hers that I have not read yet. Ways To Live Forever was her debut novel, published in 2018, and it is the story of Sam. Sam is terminally ill and seeking for answers to “the questions that nobody answers”. He is also very aware of the time that “by the time you read this, I will probably be dead.”

It’s difficult to handle a book like this and not to make it, let’s be frank. awful. Nicholls handles it all so well. So delicately. She steps back rather than stepping forward. Does that make sense? Let’s see if I can make it clearer. There’s this thing when you’re writing, a temptation to fill the page with everything that you want the reader to know, to feel. You want the reader to stay with you and rightfully so: we’re together in this. And yet there’s a secret in the process and that is this: editing. Cutting. Stepping back from the page. Making yourself stop. Letting the page breathe.

(So much of writing comes in editing! It’s such a contrarian thing!)

And Nicholls steps back. So well. Throughout all of this, there’s this very great elegance to what she does. She gives you just enough. She trusts you to come on the journey with her. She trusts her story to do the work that it needs to do. And it really does. This is a moving and often fiercely profound exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to live with a terminal illness. It is very delicate, very graceful thing and the ending will break your heart.

Nicholls writes with an enormous eloquence. This book is such a lesson in the good stuff, it really is.

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