Novels about death and illness

There is an article in today's New York Times about Philip Roth, whose new novel, Everyman, is due out in May.

Roth is 73 and in good health, but many of the novel's characters aren't so fortunate.

One paragraph in particular struck me:

Mr. Roth added that when he began thinking of novels about death and illness—not just books in which sick people die, but those that take illness as their main subject—he couldn't come up with many beyond the obvious: Mann's "Magic Mountain," Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" and Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich."

Of course there are many more such novels yet, like Roth, I can't think of them.

Know a novel about death and illness?

--Marshal Zeringue