Seven days after his mother dies in a sudden, senseless accident, seventeen-year-old Will embarks on a search for meaning that leads him to the great philosophers—Plato, Seneca, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche—and to Taryn, the beautiful girl he meets at his mother's wake. In Lia Hills's The Beginner's Guide to Living, Will is desperate to find, however he can, something authentic, something ultimate, something so true he would live or die for it. But is he willing to risk losing Taryn—losing everything--to seek the answers he craves?
LIA HILLS is the author of the award-winning adult poetry collection, the possibility of flight, and the translator of Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. The Beginner's Guide to Living is her first novel.