John Dugdale

Mortality Tale

Everyman

By

Jonathan Cape 182pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

In Philip Roth’s 2001 novella, The Dying Animal, the protagonist, David Kepesh, was forced to confront mortality in a former lover – a young woman sentenced to death by cancer. In Everyman, also a short work, the dying animal becomes the hero himself: it opens with his funeral, and ends with the operation that killed him.

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