In the sixth of our series in which writers recall a book that brought them comfort at a bleak time in their lives, our contributor chooses Malone Dies, by Samuel Beckett

Few of us expect to die while on holiday abroad, but that is was happened, 17 years ago, to my father. In November 2002 he arrived with my mother in the Estonian capital of Tallinn for a winter break, which ended in a mortuary. His death at 74 gave me such a shock as no words can easily convey. Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (first published in French in 1951 as Malone meurt) helped. Bed-bound and alone in the dark, Malone awaits his own death with dark humour. “I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption.”

Beckett, with his quizzically peering gaze and hawk-like appearance, is often seen as an unsmiling theologian of doom, but his vision was essentially comic. The pared-down prose of Malone Dies is a distillation of the whiskey-fuelled blarney that Beckett had known in his native Dublin. Malone tells himself stories in order to pass the time of day. One of them is about a poor farmhand called Saposcat, from the Greek skatos – “concerning dung”. Malone Dies contains in embryo Beckett’s whole world of comic dread peopled by tramps, waifs, strays and other “crotchety moribunds”.