A Beginners Guide to Dying, Simon Boas
A Beginners Guide to Dying, Simon Boas
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A Beginner's Guide to Dying

Author: Simon Boas

Narrator: Simon Boas

Unabridged: 2 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/15/2025

Synopsis

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Lessons for all of us in how to approach life—from someone in the process of dying. • "Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality." —Hospice Nurse Julie McFadden, author of Nothing to Fear

In his mid-40s, aid worker Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer—it had been caught too late, and spread throughout his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live—optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritizing what really matters in life. Deemed “a funny, touching meditation on death” by the Sunday Times, this warm and wise book offers lessons for all of us in how to approach life.

The advice includes: “Do get in touch, but don’t just turn up unaccounted,” and “Do listen, but don’t minimize things.” And just as wisely: “to exist is to have won the lottery of life.”

This remarkable book, a runaway bestseller in the UK, is not just a meditation on dying, but also a hymn to the joy and preciousness of life. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying is destined to become a modern classic.

About The Author

Simon Boas was born in 1977 and spent his childhood in London and Winchester. He spent his career working for development charities across the globe as well as the UN. At 46, he was diagnosed with advanced throat cancer. In the year following, he wrote pieces about happiness and illness for his local paper, which went viral, encouraging him to expand. A Beginner's Guide to Dying is the result.

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Quotes

“Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality. I read this manuscript in a single afternoon, laughing and crying in equal measure, and knew I had to bring it to readers. His voice is one that lingers—both a celebration of life and a guide to its inevitable end.”
—Hospice Nurse Julie McFadden, RN, author of Nothing to Fear

“I had the privilege to conduct Simon’s last broadcast interview—knowing his wise words on the page could live on afterwards. How lucky we all are to have someone as generous as him to share such important perspectives on life while dying.”
—Emma Barnett, BBC Radio 4 Today

“Extraordinary. . . . The late author’s reflections on his cancer diagnosis thrum with life and wit, and will make you laugh and cry”
—Alex Preston, Observer

“Has anyone ever written a more inspirational paean to the joy of life?”
—Daily Mail

“A funny, touching meditation on death.”
—Sunday Times

“Reading A Beginner’s Guide to Dying you’re struck repeatedly by the terrible juxtaposition of the rush of erudition from this fantastically bright mind still thrumming with life and wit, and the silence of the end, which is so near. . . . There are wonderful vignettes, beautiful meditations on faith and friendship, advice for the dying and those around them.”
—The Guardian

“I hope this tiny treasure chest of a book will be read, shared, gifted, laughed with, cried over, thought about and reflected on far and wide.”
—Kathryn Mannix, author of With the End in Mind

“Simon Boas’ outlook on life is an inspiration to us all, and his wonderful book is full of both wisdom and humor.”
—Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works

“Boas’s cheerful stoicism seems to have touched the nation.”
—Daily Telegraph

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