The Second Life of Nathan Jones: A laugh out loud, OMG! romcom that you won’t be able to put down!
The bestselling author of Love Byte is back with this laugh-out-loud hilarious rom com! Getting hit by a bus was the best thing that ever happened to him… When one wrong step – and the poor timing of the number 19 bus – send Nathan Jones to the Edinburgh morgue his story should have ended…but then he went and woke up. Returned to real life Nathan finds a wife disappointed that he’s miraculously returned from the dead and an unshakeable attraction for mortuary technician Kat – the woman who brought him back to life, in more ways than one. Now, as his world implodes and Kat leads him down an unexpected path, Nathan somehow finds himself having the time of his second life… A hilarious, uplifting story of second chances, death defying hijinks and motorhome mayhem – Mhairi McFarlane meets Eleanor Oliphant!
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The Second Life of Nathan Jones
DAVID ATKINSON
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HarperImpulse
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © David Atkinson 2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
David Atkinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008327880
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008327873
Version: 2019-06-27
Table of Contents
Getting killed hadn’t been part of Nathan Jones’s plans for Saturday afternoon. Instead, he’d mapped out a nice relaxing time for himself on the sofa catching up on TheWalking Dead boxset he’d got for his birthday.
His wife Laura and their three children were in the kingdom of Fife, visiting her mother, and weren’t due back until the evening. He pottered from room to room, still in his pyjamas, revelling in the hush that had descended upon his normally noisy life.
Nathan polished off one of his favourite toasted cinnamon bagels, smothered with some of Tesco’s finest jam, whilst flicking from channel to channel making the most of having sole custody of the remote control. Had he known what was in store for him when he left his flat, he would have remained safely seated on the couch and phoned for a takeaway dinner.
Instead, he got dressed, zipped up his coat and headed out into the windy November afternoon munching a bag of pickled-onion-flavoured Monster Munch crisps. His planned destination had been the local Tesco but as he crossed the busy road adjacent to his flat he had an unfortunate run-in with a bus that subsequently changed everything.
When he pieced together the incident later, it appeared he had stepped off the pavement right into the path of the twelve-tonne vehicle. This was obviously a very silly thing to do and so unlike his normally cautious approach to life. He couldn’t remember the number of times he’d drummed into his children’s heads ‘STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN’.
The ambulance arrived in record time, but a paramedic pronounced him dead at the scene and an A & E doctor confirmed the decision a short time later at the local hospital.
He remembered very little about dying. If pushed, he would classify it as a complete non-event. Nothing flashed before his eyes and no dead relatives stood beckoning him into the light. Even if they had, his relationship with his family had been such that the likely outcome would have been him running in the opposite direction.
If Karen Gillan had been tasked with bringing him into the fold he might have considered it, but she hadn’t, probably because
1. She happened to be still very much alive and
2. He didn’t merit a heavenly Hollywood A-list reception committee.
His first impression of death? A vastly overrated experience and he had no idea why everyone made such a fuss over it.
He’d felt that way about several things in recent years: the various royal weddings and births, the Brexit fiasco and the launch of the latest incarnation of the iPhone.
His poor impression of death might be down to the fact that, like many things in life, Nathan didn’t do it very well. He was rubbish at lots of things. He couldn’t ski, skate or work out quadratic equations and had issues with authority figures. He could now add dying to the list.
Thinking back to his childhood, Nathan recalled that his mum’s main concern about death had been underwear.
‘Nathan, you must make sure that every day you leave the house in clean underpants, just in case you’re involved in any kind of accident. I don’t want you showing me up in hospital.’
For that reason, whenever she left the house her underwear would be clean and as new as possible. Even as a relatively young kid, Nathan realised that if she ever got injured so badly in an accident that she needed hospital admission her underwear would more than likely be soiled to the point that it would have to be binned.
