An accident, a suicide, an act of criminal negligence . . . and a near-death experience. The stories in Emma Donoghue's Three and a Half Deaths - set in France, the USA and Canada - bring together calamities from two centuries. 'What the Driver Saw' is inspired by a freak accident on Nice's Promenade des Anglais, the 1920s equivalent of Princess Diana's last ride through Paris. 'The Trap' takes us to New York, 1878, when a woman at the centre of a public scandal decides that she's finally had enough. Any thinking about death must of course include its lingering effects on the living; 'Sissy' explores the guilt and culpability of a woman whose young sister died in the 1840s in London, Ontario. Finally, 'Fall' is about an incident at Niagara Falls in 1901 when a middle-aged schoolteacher staked her whole future on an act so daring it could be called suicidal. A near-death, a sort of rebirth: the kind of moment that makes visible the discreet courage it takes to live a whole life.