Coda [Hardcover]

'Funny and deeply moving, the fourth volume of The Smoking Diaries charts Gray's final year in clear-eyed, poignant detail' --Sunday Times

`Mordantly funny, unsparing of himself and others, desperately brave, it is both compulsive and agonising to read'

'Gray has that unfakeable quality of loveability. Few books have ever been more immediate, more rooted in the present tense'

'A casually perfect but unexpectedly painful early full stop to a life and mind for which we are immeasurably richer'

'His beautifully written, addictively readable, unsparingly honest journals are his greatest achievement - and will survive the test of time'

It's coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I've just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow.So begins Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - 'everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people' - Gray's self-proclaimed 'last written words on the subject of myself' records his extraordinary emotional journey.Darkly comic depictions of the medical team - there's the Chipmunk of Doom, who spells out Gray's woeful prognosis uninvited; the charming, floppy-haired neurologist, aka 'Mummy's delight'; the 'mortifyingly pretty doctor' who arrives to fit his catheter; and the elegant nurse who breezily observes he smells of urine - are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with this beloved wife, Victoria, in Crete and a beautiful early summer in Suffolk. Woven into the narrative are arguments with himself, 'Dialogue between a Thicko and a Sicko', a shameful childhood memory and a masterfully tense 'distraction', written in real time while waiting for his final prognosis - and smoking one last cigarette.Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray's "Coda" is as life-affirming as it is heartrending.

Simon Gray was awarded a CBE in the 2005 New Years Honours list. He is the author of over 30 plays, including Butley (1971), The Common Pursuit (1984) and Cell Mates (1995). He has published several volumes of diaries and memoir including The Smoking Diaries, Enter a Fox and Fat Chance all published by Granta. The Last Cigarette publishes in April 2008. He lives in London.