A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.

For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

“A powerful book that comes as close as anything I’ve read in explaining what it means to be human. Sebastian Junger is one of the finest writers of our generation.” — James Patterson, New York Times #1 bestselling author

“Sebastian Junger, a virtuoso of narrative nonfiction, has conjured his most personal and yet universal book, a stunning account I didn’t so much read as inhale, awed and riveted and forever changed.”  — Michael Finkel, New York Times bestselling author of The Art Thief

“Sebastian Junger is known for standing on the front lines in places that scare the hell out of the rest of us. Nowhere is that truer than in In My Time of Dying, where he turns inward to examine his own mortality, the most frightening—yet fascinating—frontier there is.” — Caitlin Doughty, New York Times bestselling author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Junger reports on startling, critical situations, rather like Ernest Hemingway or Truman Capote, without stylization that calls attention to itself...In My Time of Dying is an uplifting book because Junger is in awe of what it means to be alive.” — Winnipeg Free Press