They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera (25 Books in 25 Days: #21)

Apparently I’ve reached the age where I no longer remember what I’ve read. Today’s book was supposed to be The Listerdale Mystery by Agatha Christie – a collection of short stories. I kept thinking the stories were familiar. I realised I’d seen one as a play. And then I thought maybe some of them had been included in other collections. I was 60 pages in when I decided to look it up in my reading journal… and, yes, I read it in 2014. I even wrote a little bit about it. Sigh.

So, I put that one aside (as each story was becoming rather disappointing, once I remembered the outcome) – and chose They Both Die at the End (2017) by Adam Silvera as today’s book. Which was sort of cheating, because I only had about 80 pages left to read – but needs must.

I bought They Both Die at the End after reading a review on Gilt and Dust that made it sound really intriguing, and I recommend heading there for a fuller review than I’m going to be able to give in my #25Booksin25Days haste. The brilliant title caught my attention, and the premise won me over. It’s set in a world that is identical to ours – except people receive a phone call on the day they will die, telling them that they have less than 24 hours to live. It might be a minute, it might be 23 hours and 59 minutes. They don’t know. (Has Silvera been reading Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, I wonder? I am trying to persuade Rachel to let us compare these two books on ‘Tea or Books?’ – watch this space.)

As the novel opens, the two teenage boy protagonists are just receiving the phone call. One is shy, geeky Mateo, who is already sad because his father is in a coma. The other is Rufus, who grew up in a foster home and is now in a gang (albeit a generally amiable one – except when he’s pulverising his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, which he is doing when he gets the Death-Cast call). Silvera does a good job of making us like Rufus after this unpromising beginning.

The chapters alternate between Mateo and Rufus, with chapters thrown in from other viewpoints when necessary. They meet through the Last Friend app, and the novel tells of their growing friendship, all while waiting to find out when and how they will die. Like, as Silvera writes in his acknowledgements, a dark game of Jenga.

This is teenage fiction, and I partly read it in preparation for our latest ‘Tea or Books?’ episode on exactly that. So it’s very easy reading, and I expect it would appeal to the heartstrings of early teens far more than to this cynical 33 year old. But I still really enjoyed racing through it – mostly because of the extremely clever concept, which is sustained and explored with great ingenuity. If Silvera has other concepts up his sleeve this impressive, then I’ll probably find myself reading more of ’em.