Evening Post Books, of the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Post and Courier, has announced the release of This Is How People Die, a bold and genre-defying debut novel by Charleston native and international journalist Will Cathcart. The novel will be published in softcover on April 28, 2026, with a public launch event planned for May 14 at the Charleston Library Society.
Set between a modern sanitarium in downtown Charleston and the shadowed edges of Europe and the Republic of Georgia, This Is How People Die follows Scoot and Hannah — cystic fibrosis patients who have outlived their expected lifespans and every expectation that comes with being alive. Here, living “the Salt Life” means nebulizing saline solution, and coughing is a form of revival. There is no cure and too many kinds of medicine.
But these are not people who die quietly.
When Hannah leaves behind a final dare as her will and testament, Scoot follows her far beyond the confines of the waiting room — from a Paris museum haunted by George Sand and the Romantics, to a Polish cathedral where he steals the preserved heart of Frédéric Chopin, and onward to the edge of Tbilisi, Georgia, where agents from the CIA, GRU, Interpol and Hannah’s past converge on his trail.
Told in singular, kinetic prose, This Is How People Die is at once a love story, a high-stakes caper, a meditation on mortality and a globe-spanning chase. It is absurd and luminous, darkly comic and deeply human — a novel that asks what it means to keep living when mere survival is no longer enough.