Will Cathcart is a journalist and editor whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, CNN, and others. He spent more than a decade covering post-Soviet conflicts and disinformation campaigns as a foreign correspondent based in Tbilisi, Georgia. Born and raised in Charleston, SC, Cathcart now returns home with This is How People Die, his debut novel — a literary reckoning with illness, identity, and the interiority of survival.
About the Book
From Charleston-born geopolitical journalist Will Cathcart comes This is How People Die — a genre-bending debut novel that fuses literary gravitas with dark humor, psychological insight, and a dash of absurdity. At its core is Scooter “Scoot” Jackson, a man with Cystic Fibrosis on a surreal mission to return the heart of composer Frédéric Chopin to its rightful resting place. Why? Because a girl asked him to. What follows is a sharp, swirling, and deeply human adventure that unfolds across continents and consciousness. Part fever dream, part existential investigation, This is How People Die asks what happens when the mind fights the body and the body starts to win, is it madness to mythologize pain, or is it how we survive it, and what does it mean to grieve for yourself while you’re still alive? Channeling the intellectual play of Vonnegut, the lyricism of Capote, and the haunted wisdom of McCarthy, Cathcart delivers a debut that’s both cerebral and soulful — a novel as interested in the mechanics of breathing as it is in the mechanics of being.