[Kerry]

The QI Book of the Dead is a book about life. What an awful thing life is. It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Around 90 billion people have existed since the human race began. From this huge number, the bestselling QI team selected 600 of the finest examples of our species and researched them in depth, distilling this immense banquet of life into an exquisite tasting menu of six-dozen crisp, racy mini-biographies, where the internationally and immortally famous rub shoulders with the undeservedly and (until now) permanently obscure. The object is to learn something about what it means to be alive and how we can make the most of the time we have. The QI Book of the Dead compares and contrasts the different ways individual human beings cope (or fail to cope) with the curves that the uncaring universe throws at us. Collected into themed chapters with thought-provoking titles such as ‘There’s Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life’, ‘Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone’ and ‘Is That All There Is?’ here is a chance to share the secrets of the Dead, to celebrate their wisdom, to learn from their mistakes, and to marvel at their bad taste in clothes. The man who is not dead still has a chance. LEBANESE PROVERB *We don’t rule out the alternative possibility of a compassionate God whose motives are beyond our ken