For poison-tongued Lily Bloom, being dead in the London borough of Dulston is only marginally less bearable than the terminally disappointing life she has left behind in the strangely similar Kentish Town. In both worlds, she is haunted by the ghosts of her past mistakes and sustained by the resilience of her sinner's pride, lust, anger and so on down the list. Her story pours out in a rhythmic rush of invective, smart one-liners; grotesque imagery; elegiac poetry; elaborate alliteration; and a boundless vocabulary, which reminds us that this is, after all, a book by Will Self. In the end, to the dismay of her Aboriginal death guide, Lily opts for another turn on the "go-round", even if, ultimately, it leads to another spell in Dulston (though certainly not in the more well-to-do purgatory of Dulburb, the English afterlife remaining resolutely set in its class ways). She is as addicted to life as her two daughters are to cash and smack respectively - but being born again in this book is never going to mean salvation.