Allen & Unwin Until Further Notice, I am Alive book Biography English Paperback 160 pages

A unique reckoning with the human condition, written in beautiful, honest, unsentimental and aphoristic prose.

In 2008, Tom Lubbock was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and told he had only one or two years to live. In this remarkable record of those years, lived out in three-month intervals between scans, he examines the question of how to live with death in sight.As the tumour progressed, Tom engaged intensely and imaginatively with work, art, friends, and his wife and their young son, while trying to remain focused on the fact of his impending death. His tumour was located in the area of the brain associated with language, and he describes losing control over the spoken and written word and the resources he drew on to keep communicating; a struggle which brought him ever closer to the mysteries of the origin of speech. As the Independent's chief art critic, he was renowned for the clarity and unconventionality of his writing, and the same fierce intelligence permeates this extraordinary memoir. This is a book written by a man wholly engaged with life even as it ends.

Tom Lubbock, writer and illustrator, was the chief art critic of the Independent between 1997 and 2011. In 2008 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Until Further Notice, I Am Alive is his memoir chronicling the years that followed. Tom Lubbock died in 2011. Great Works, his collection of essays on painting, was published in October 2011.