Love and Other Near-Death Experiences

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 fiancée, 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.

"Weird, in a good way, defines the spirited amalgam of madcap romanticism, mordant spirituality and oddball adventure that infuses British writer Millington's third novel (A Certain Chemistry; Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About). Rob Garland's life is decidedly unsettled. He's dithering about his upcoming nuptials. He's bored at the radio station where he hosts a late-night jazz show. And by all odds he ought to be dead, except that a quick errand, coupled with an infuriating traffic tie-up, makes him late for lunch with a musician — who is among those immolated when a tanker truck plows into the restaurant. After Garland forsakes his playlist one night to rant about his near-death experience, he finds himself at the center of a circle of like survivors, including a brawny American soldier who escaped death in war-torn Bosnia and an addled British schoolteacher who left her Bulgarian hotel in search of cigarettes and returned to find it in flames. There are times when this off-in-all-directions novel explodes into the edgily surreal, and its intense Britishness may confound some readers. But the audacious originality of Millington's witty plot and the energy of his crisp, comic dialogue are wholly engaging. Agent, Fletcher & Parry." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Beneath the brittle humor and madcap adventure, Millington's novel is oddly sentimental, even old-fashioned." Kirkus Reviews

"Excellent dialogue, great pacing, and strong characterizations pull the novel through its periodic implausibility....[A]s memorable as it is heartwarming and as deep as it is fun." Booklist

Mil Millington has written for various magazines, radio, and The Guardian. His website (www.milmillington.com) has achieved cult status, and he is also a co-founder and co-writer of the online magazine The Weekly. He is currently working on the screenplay for Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About for Working Title films. He lives in England's West Midlands with his girlfriend and their two children. And everything, ever, is his fault, apparently.