Andrew Bomback

‘You’re Too Wonderful To Die’, the story of a medical man’s struggle with his faith in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, is a very authentic and creditable first novel. It is not perfect – there are one or two structural difficulties and the occasional technical error – but it is engaging from the outset and written in a beautifully understated manner. Take, for example, the fact that the grieving narrator, Alex Glassman, is dissuaded from taking a plane trip to visit his parents by the sudden realisation that, ‘I wouldn’t mind being in a plane crash.’

In other places, the author’s medical knowledge (Bomback is himself a doctor) is used to lend dry humour to what otherwise might be a bleak read. Trying to reassure his severely ill patient – Esme, the girl who is too wonderful to die - that the consequences of bad side effects of her treatment are tiny, Alex tells her that, ‘…we’re talking of something along the lines of less than one percent.’ Soon after this, Esme makes it clear that she does not want to go on a ventilator. ‘Is it true,’ she asks, ‘that once someone with cystic fibrosis goes on a ventilator, she never comes off?’ Alex tells her that, ‘Doctors don’t like to use the word never.’ Esme replies, ‘But we’re talking something along the lines of less than one percent, aren’t we?’… (més)