The Gift

A Novel by Alan Carmichael

The loneliest journey that any of us will undertake will also be our last. Our final moments of consciousness present us with a path we follow on our own.

Yet if someone were to claim the ability to walk with the dying through this psychological hinterland, would our assumptions about the nature of death be changed? Or would so miraculous a claim say more about the delusions of the living?

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The Gift traces the stories of Angela Howarth, who believes she has such an ability, and Alex Westerman, a policeman looking into a pattern of deaths in the towns and villages of Oxfordshire.

Alex Westerman's new case suggests that a number of elderly people are dying in unusual - perhaps sinister - circumstances. When news of his failing health breaks and he is suspended, he feels impelled to continue with the investigation on his own.

Angela Howarth carries a secret from the night her grandmother died while she was still a teenager. Now, in her thirties, she frets that her gift has served to prevent her enjoying a full life in this world. She is drawn into a friendship with Hiromi Ikuda, a Japanese scientist, and finds herself attracted by a sensibility she discerns beneath the rigour of his scientific ethos. As their intimacy develops, she is driven to question the nature of her gift.

But it is at the moment of the unravelling of Angela's secret, in which all three face their own or another's death, that the limits of what we can ever know about those we care for are made clear. And with that knowledge comes, for all three, an insight into the irreducible preciousness of all our lives.

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The Gift looks at the conflict between the mystical and the rational, and also at the tensions between individual freedom and the constraints of the law. It asks whether the aspiration towards the good life - and the good death - can ever be something other than illusory.