DARE TO KNOW

Do not exceed expiry date

- Eddie Robson

RELEASED 14 SEPTEMBER

304 pages | Hardback/ebook

Author James Kennedy

Publisher Quirk Books

Who’d want to know the exact date and time of their death? According to Dare To Know, plenty of people – and they’d be willing to pay for it too. The unnamed narrator is a mathematician and salesman, making the arcane and subjective calculations that produce expiry dates for the clients of a company called Dare To Know.

He’s also middle-aged, divorced and directionless; his performance at the company is on the slide and his commissions are shrinking. After a car crash, he takes the forbidden step of looking up his own time, only to discover that he was supposed to die 23 minutes ago. This is unheard of. The calculations are never wrong. He becomes desperate to find out what it means, and seeks the answers in his own past.

James Kennedy’s first novel for adults (he has a previous children’s book to his name) is audaciously clever and well-written. It’s set in a present day where this weird branch of physics, based around particles known as thanaton, has become a normal part of the world. It hasn’t actually changed the world that much, though it’s opened up philosophical quandaries around the nature of free will, and naturally it’s had an effect on those who have elected to find out their death date.

It makes sense that everyone else would just try to ignore it. A particularly striking and bleakly funny passage relates an incident where a man informed all the passengers on a plane that he’d just learned he was going to die on this flight, and therefore everyone else was surely going to die too.