Skip to content

'Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead' Reading Group Guide

Atlantic Books is offering guides to reading groups UK-wide for the critically-acclaimed novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin, out now in hardback and ebook, and available in paperback from 2nd June 2022.

THE BLURB

‘Funny about death, real about anxiety, witty about the things that worry us the most’ Emma Gannon, author of Olive

‘So fundamentally kind that you can feel the warmth coming off each page’ Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days

Gilda cannot stop thinking about death. Desperate for relief from her anxious mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local church and finds herself abruptly hired to replace the deceased receptionist Grace. It’s not the most obvious job – she’s queer and an atheist for starters – and so in between trying to learn mass, hiding her new maybe-girlfriend and conducting an amateur investigation into Grace’s death, Gilda must avoid revealing the truth of her mortifying existence.

A blend of warmth, deadpan humour, and pitch-perfect observations about the human condition, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a crackling exploration of what it takes to stay afloat in a world where your expiration – and the expiration of those you love – is the only certainty.

News

Radio 2 Book Club - Winter titles

The Winter season of the Radio 2 Book Club is out now, with brilliant brand-new fiction titles to discover. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It features a wide range of titles and authors, recommending great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging listeners to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, and share their opinions and insights on the titles and great reads they’re enjoying right now.

Resources

How to start a reading group

Interested in joining a reading group or starting one of your own? Download our quick guide to getting started. You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online.

News

Discussion guides

We know how useful a discussion guide is for your book club meeting, so here you’ll find some recent guides provided by publishers. Free to download, you can use them to help choose your next book and guide your discussion.

View our other programmes