So Much For That by Lionel Shriver (Harper, £7.99) (From The Northern Echo)

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver (Harper, £7.99)

3:11pm Monday 1st August 2011 in Fiction By Steve Craggs

WHAT do you pack for the rest of your life? Shepherd Knacker has been saving all his working life for a one-way ticket away from the daily grind.

When he sells his handyman business for $1m, The Afterlife seems tantalisingly within reach. Yet his wife has concocted one reason after another why now isn’t the time to go, and now announces that she needs his health insurance.

Illustrating how a marriage is both stressed and strengthened by medical crisis, this novel poses the uncomfortable fiscal question: how much is one life worth?