Published By: Atlantic
Pages: 304
Released On: 02/07/2026
‘As I hold her, as the white sky spits at us,
something inside me breaks, and I know I’ve been a fool.
How could I let this happen?
Day by day, this little family have sunk their roots into my skin.’
Travis lives an unassuming life with his cat in a small English town. Travis also happens to be the cosmic force of Death, visiting people in their final days and hours of life, before shepherding them into whatever happens next. He doesn’t judge them, doesn’t feel emotion at their passing, and never tries to change anyone’s fate… until he meets a young, single midwife called Dalia and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter, Layla. As he gets closer to this small, seemingly unremarkable family, Travis begins to learn what it is that makes life so worth living, and so what it is that is irrevocably lost in death.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had such high hopes for this book because of all the praise I’d seen about it.
Firstly I will point out that there are no speech marks, which I generally hate. This does use other punctuation marks to show when it changes from prose to dialogue, but not speech marks, and I can never figure out why that’s a choice. Now, normally this would automatically deduct at least one star, but the rest of this book is so fabulous that it usurped that.
I am fascinated by death and what comes next and so the exploration of that in this book was really interesting. Death is frightening, of course it is, our own and our loved ones’. But having lost quite a few people over the years, I’ve got used to it. And it’s not quite as frightening for me. And that’s what I oved about this, how positive it was. That death doesn’t have to be as scary as we think and it can be just as positive as life.
I also loved the range of deaths, the range of ages to show that death is not discriminatory, sadly we don’t all get to live to 100 before we toddle off, and he’s not hidden from that.
It’s narrated by death, and the face that people can interact with him as a man, but also as death when the time comes, I found interesting. This idea that death could literally be round the corner.
I mean, it’s a book about death so why am I so surprised that it made me cry?
For a book about death – the person and the concept – it is surprisingly uplifting for the most part, and life affirming. It talks about making the most of each day, of living the life you want and not the life that makes others happy, to love who you love, and just to live. As someone with depression, I find it difficult to see the positives in life but this book has just put them on a plate for me to pick from.
This is such a perfect book that I’m not sure I’ll ever find its equal. It will stay with me forever I think.
Books By Your Bedside 