Some chapters veer into speculative fiction – cryogenics, a cure for ageing. The novel spins out a dozen alternative scenarios: one spouse goes through with it, the other doesn’t they enter a Club Med care home, or their children section them into a Cuckoo’s Nest care home. What do the couple do?ĭespite the morbid premise, I’m hoping a playful parallel-universe structure makes Should We Stay improbably fun. Whoosh, whoosh, we fast-forward their story, just as our time on this earth seems to race by before we know it in real life. They’re still in their early 50s, and this prospect seems a long way off.
Having concluded, like Jolanta, that beyond the knell of about eight decades life is all downhill, they make a pact: once they’ve both crossed that threshold on Kay’s 80th birthday, they’ll kill themselves. After Kay’s father finally dies in a state of ruinous dementia, the couple are determined to avoid the same grim fate. A nurse and GP in the NHS, Kay and Cyril Wilkinson have treated numerous patients eroded by ageing’s remorseless decay. That, in a nutshell, is the genesis of my new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go.
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