Nothing brings as much clarity to the mind as proximity to death. As people approach the end of their lives, they write wills and make final confessions and wishes — attempts to clear away the emotional and material detritus of a life. But unlike that other inevitability in life; taxes, death does not always arrive with a neat balancing of accounts. More often, it is messy: both in form or in the many ways it approaches us, and in the things left behind — untendered apologies, undeclared love or forgiveness, unoffered explanations.

In films and some books, however, neat endings and the ticking off of bucket lists are narrative devices meant to reassure us that death brings with it a reckoning, an opportunity to leave behind a well-balanced account of one’s life. Some recent reads, however, are far less interested in offering that kind of comfort.

Altering the course

In The Rest of Our Lives, Ben Markovits’s 2025 novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the messiness of it all is laid bare in all its uneasy glory. What begins as a midlife crisis road trip gradually circles back to a New York hospital, ending in a deliberately nebulous fashion.

In language that is plain but packs a punch, the book takes us through what appears to be a midlife crisis of the protagonist Tom. His wife, Amy, had an affair in the past.

Tom promised himself then that he would leave his wife once his last child, Miri, goes off to college. “What we obviously had,” says Tom in the book, “even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.”

Tom takes off on a road trip, first to drop his daughter off at college, and later to visit his brother, his son, and an old girlfriend — an almost self-meditative way of assessing his life, trying to resolve some things before embarking on his new spouse-less life. The book ends abruptly when Tom’s facial swelling turns out to be a cancer diagnosis. It takes him to the radiation department of a hospital, with his wife in attendance, his plans of leaving her clearly upended.

Much was written by reviewers about the abruptness of the ending, but it carried, in a way, a hint of vérité — of life and death simply happening to you unexpectedly, disrupting well-laid-out plans.

The unsent letter

In a way, the book differs from The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, also published in 2025. An epistolary novel, it is a life told through the letters of Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman in her 70s. Through lengthy and frequent correspondence, she does not leave much unsaid to her family and friends, unlike Tom in The Rest of Our Lives.

Sybil was a lawyer who clerked for a judge for much of her career, and even manages to find some closure in an old case she handled, marked by a miscarriage of justice.

It is her one unsent letter, hidden in the pages of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, found after her death by her neighbour Theodor, that solves a mystery running like a thread through the novel. The letter is addressed to Sybil’s former husband Daan, who has already died by the time it is discovered.

It explains, or tries to, the reasons their marriage imploded, the fractured relationships she had with her other children, and why, despite Daan’s request, she could not bring herself to meet him at the end of his life. There are some secrets that do follow people into the grave, even for those who appear as open and reflective as Sybil in her correspondence.

It is the people left behind who need closure, as they continue to live with the questions that each death leaves unanswered. If Sybil’s story explores closure through writing, Evie King’s book shows what happens when closure becomes an administrative task.

Quiet departures

In Ashes To Admin: The Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer, the protagonist, King herself, is a council case worker in charge of pauper’s graves — or, as she keeps saying throughout the book, funerals for people who die alone, whether poor or rich, who have outlived or are estranged from all their kin.

In case after case she handles, King speaks of her attempts to construct a life, a kinship and friendship network that preceded these lonely deaths. In some instances, she finds family members still living, or even a club of bike enthusiasts who can swell the numbers at the funeral parlour.

In each funeral she oversees, however, the deaths affect her and she realises she needs closure. “Befriend death, turn a light on, extinguish those shadows and live well; because that’s the bit that matters,” she says, embracing life.

How we handle the one certain thing in life — death — is never neat, yet it is something we all share as a human experience, even as we encounter it separately.

The transformative power of literature can illuminate that condition, but there is no manual to take us across the finish line.