Product details
- ISBN 9781806770816
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Wilton Square Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Grief, joy and spilled rum at the world’s death festivals
By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. Erica searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.
With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, she decided to confront death head on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.
This Party’s Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.
Erica Buist is a writer and journalist based in London.
She was hired as a digital journalist for The Guardian after going viral with her anonymous blog ‘How to Be Jobless’.
She has also written for the BBC, The Sunday Times, the Daily Mirror, ShortList, The Debrief, Refinery29 and Grazia, and she has had short stories and essays published in various literary journals.
