From inspirational autobiographical recounts and reflective personal essays, to perception-shifting fiction; we’ve curated seven of the most moving, insightful and uplifting books on grief, loss and mortality. Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s maiden auntie. I was especially struck by the conviction of a man who was a staunch atheist unflinchingly prepared for a godless death.

One of these notes reads: "If I convert it's because it's better a believer dies than that an atheist does.There he was forced to confront the weight of his mortality, after doctors diagnosed him with esophageal cancer. Another positive review came from the magazine where Hitchens started his career, The New Statesman.

Since a near-fatal and life-changing stroke in 1995 at the age of 42, Robert McCrum has had an unavoidable awareness of his own mortality, which has only grown as he’s aged.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kubler-​Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. And eventually, between the treatments and the degenerative nature of his illness, he lost the ability to speak.