Monday, May 07, 2007

Pg. 99: "Love and Other Near-Death Experiences"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Mil Millington's Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

About the book, from the publisher:
Hello. My name is Robert, and I haven’t been dead for sixty-three days now.

If he hadn’t bought those crummy towels, Rob would be six feet under. But his poor shopping sense accidentally set off a convoluted chain of events that meant he lived when all those others died in the pub explosion. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the ugly towels that saved his life. Perhaps it was some other random action, some other small movement that was the utterly trivial yet vitally important factor. And that’s the real problem.

Now, with his wedding fast approaching, Rob suddenly finds himself paralyzed with indecision–about Every. Little. Thing. He just can't be sure which seemingly innocuous choice will mean the difference between life and death: Should he wash the fork or the knife first? Should he step out of the shower with his left leg or his right leg? Red sweater or blue? One thing is certain: His fiancĂ©e, Jo, is at her wits’ end.

To save his relationship and his sanity, Rob embarks on a quest to find out why he’s still breathing. When he meets up with others who have had similar lifesaving near misses, he figures the answer must be close. But fate may just catch them yet, for Rob’s search to understand why he’s still alive might well turn out to be the very thing that kills them all.

Filled with the barbed and sparkling dialogue that made Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About a cult hit, Mil Millington’s Love and Other Near-Death Experiences is a hilarious existential romantic comedy about second guesses and second chances.
Among the praise for the novel:
"If there is a male Bridget Jones, bringing intimate dispatches from the other side of the sex divide, it is Mil Millington.... He is horribly accurate and highly amusing about the nuts and bolts of modern relationships.... Hilarious."
--Kate Saunders, (London) Times

"'Mil Millington ... is sharp and witty and bright as a button."
--Wiliam Leith, Daily Telegraph

"Love and Other Near-Death Experiences really is laugh out loud funny.... Millington has come up with an ingenious and ... wholly original premise - the kind of premise that the aforementioned 99 per cent of comic novelists would walk barefoot across hot coals to have dreamt up."
--Roger Cox, The Scotsman
Read an excerpt from Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

Mil Millington has written for various magazines, radio, and the Guardian (he also had a weekly column in the Guardian Weekend magazine). His website has achieved cult status, and he is also a co-founder and co-writer of the online magazine The Weekly. His other novels include A Certain Chemistry and Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

The Page 99 Test: Love and Other Near-Death Experiences

--Marshal Zeringue