“I’m not dead,” she declared loudly. “How the hell can I be dead?”

It was something in Irene’s eyes that stilled her. They were the eyes of someone who had seen it all, eyes that could see over horizons.

“But it does make a curious kind of sense, doesn’t it?” Irene said softly.

– Page 44

The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw

With elements of The Wizard of Oz, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Lovely Bones, The Things We Learn When We’re Dead shows how small decisions can have profound and unintended consequences, and how sometimes we can get a second chance.

On the way home from a dinner party, Lorna Love steps into the path of an oncoming car. When she wakes up she is in what appears to be a hospital – but a hospital in which her nurse looks like a young Sean Connery, she is served wine for supper, and everyone avoids her questions. It soon transpires that she is in Heaven, or on HVN. Because HVN is a lost, dysfunctional spaceship, and God the aging hippy captain. She seems to be there by accident… Or does God have a higher purpose after all?

At first Lorna can remember nothing. As her memories return – some good, some bad – she realises that she has decision to make and that maybe she needs to find a way home.

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