Elderly people have the highest global suicide rate of any demographic. Whether or not we feel like thinking about it now, many of us will turn to this issue in time. If they cut their lives artificially short, what delights might they miss out on, and what horrors might they escape? The novel considers what we all do, fleetingly, as the years advance: under what terms will we concede to keep living? Beyond what line does sticking around entail such suffering, diminishment, or humiliation that we’d rather call it quits? 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.

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver