Practising Death

A severed head on a battlefield becomes, in Marcus's hands, an argument about loneliness. Derren Brown follows that image through a pandemic that left him more cut off than he expected, then past what the existentialists made of the fear of dying and into a culture that keeps its dead close instead of hiding them. Then he does something the book rarely allows: describes, plainly, what dying itself is actually like. Practising Death asks what changes once you stop flinching from the details.