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The Easy Way Out cover art

The Easy Way Out

By: Steven Amsterdam
Narrated by: Carolyn Shakespeare-Allen
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Publisher's Summary

A brand-new novel everyone will be talking about from the award-winning author of Things We Didn't See Coming and What the Family Needed.

If you could help someone in pain, would you?

Evan is a nurse, a suicide assistant. His job is legal...just. He's the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it. Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead.

As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against legality, his own morality and the best intentions of those closest to him, discovering that his own path will be neither quick nor painless. He knows what he has to do.

In this powerful novel, movingly narrated by Carolyn Shakespeare-Allen, award-winning author Steven Amsterdam challenges listeners to face the most taboo and heartbreaking of dilemmas. Would you help someone end their life?

©2016 Steven Amsterdam (P)2016 Hachette Australia Pty Ltd
Literary Fiction
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Critic Reviews

"There's something fresh and engaging about Steven Amsterdam's writing." ( Australian Women's Weekly)
"There is plenty to mull over in this challenging and topical story by a talented and thoughtful writer." (Portia Lindsay, Books + Publishing)
"Steven Amsterdam has certainly not taken the easy way out with his new work of literary fiction. The author of What the Family Needed and Things We Didn't See Coming has taken a long and unflinching look at one of the most important issues for us as human beings; how will we deal with our own death? As a palliative care worker Amsterdam has had to face death many times, this experience radiates off the page of this astonishing novel which looks unflinchingly at the issue of terminally ill patients choosing how and when they will die. There are many voices discussing euthanasia today but very few do it with the light touch that Amsterdam brings to his work. The characters in The Easy Way Out are complex and fragile. The narrative dances between humour and pathos never lingering too long in either camp. Heartbreaking, funny, life-changing and sexy. This book raises important questions that we must all one day face and it does it without a hint of sentimentality. This is a book I wish I had written, a book I urge everyone to read." (Krissy Kneen, author of Affection, Triptych and Steeplechase)
"In this captivating novel, Steven Amsterdam explores the philosophical complexity of end-of-life choice without ever losing the urgency of an absorbing plot. The Easy Way Out is written with insight, humor, and brio." (Andrew Solomon award-winning author of Far from the Tree, The Noonday Demon and The Reckoning)
"Amsterdam is so damn good. He is up there with the best, Delillo and the like, original as Tsolkias, but most importantly he is a master storyteller in his own right, assured and compelling, he somehow articulates things you know deep down but never been able to put your finger on. I never want to stop reading him." (Anna Krien, best-selling author of Night Games, Into the Woods and US and Them)

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Profile Image for karenlouise dixon

written from truth

The scenes from a nurses perspective really rang true, palliation whilst not as final as nebitol is practiced at end of life all for the same reasons, to end extended suffering and poor quality of life. The ending where the old Viv had left and voided their pact, showed a reverance for life. Great book.

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