If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless fck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant. I should have picked a classier date-like March 28, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or November 25 (Nick Drake). Of course there'd be a low-rent crowd up there. New Year's Eve was a night for sentimental losers.
And I wasn't the happiest person in London anyway. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted to jump off the roof by five past twelve.
At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it-Happy New Year to you, too. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. Coroner? I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: "He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed." And then you read the story about the poor bastard: His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before. I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicides on the Internet, just out of curiosity. Or sometimes they say "Excuse me, I was here first." They don't say "You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity." That would be a bit strong.
But if someone jumps the queue at the post office, people tut. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all.
Why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvelous place when you pass on. Intense, hilarious, provocative, and moving, A Long Way Down is a novel about suicide that is, surprisingly, full of life. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances. In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. In his eagerly awaited fourth novel, New York Times-bestselling author Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they've reached the end of the line.
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