The Good Use of a Body

What should happen to your body when you no longer need it?

In Mara Keene's world, death no longer ends autonomy. People can donate their remains, restrict their use, transform them into memorial objects - and even sell rights to what will remain after they die.

Mara helped build the system that makes it possible.

As a senior official at the National Continuance Authority, she has spent years defending a simple principle: a competent adult's choices should survive them, even when their family disapproves.

Then her mother, Ruth, makes choices Mara cannot accept.

After Ruth's death, private grief collides with contracts, ownership, commerce, and the law itself. What begins as a daughter's attempt to understand what has happened to her mother becomes a challenge to the institution Mara helped create - and to the assumption that consent alone can justify everything a market is capable of doing.

Yet nothing is simple. The money can relieve suffering. The choices can be genuine. The benefits can be real. And the people participating are not necessarily victims.

So where does autonomy end?

When does a right become a commodity?

And can something be legally permitted, freely chosen, and still feel profoundly wrong?

The Good Use of a Body is a provocative literary novel about death, dignity, ownership, family, grief, and the unsettling consequences of turning the last human boundary into a matter of choice.