Before I Die
2007 novel by Jenny Downham
Before I Die is a young adult novel written by Jenny Downham, first published by David Fickling Books in 2007. The novel follows Tessa's shortly-ending life from her perspective.
Plot
Tessa is diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Despite four years of chemotherapy, she has discovered that her cancer is terminal, and her doctors give her a short time to live. Tessa, with the help of her best friend, Zoey, comes up with a list of things she wants to do before she dies, including some risky behaviours that she deems necessary to have "lived." Zoey is excited and supportive of the outrageous bucket list until an unplanned pregnancy test comes up positive.
Tessa's parents are divorced and have very different views on her desire to experience the dangerous side of life before she passes. Her mother is loving and joking about the situation and seems supportive, but she has not been present in Tessa's treatments or involved in her life at a deep level. Tessa's father is timid and just wants to spend time with his daughter. He is resistant to Tessa's behaviour from the start but realises that he has little influence and can only enjoy the time that they have left. Her father's main mechanism for coping is denial; she mentions that he spends hours on the computer looking up possible treatments for her even after the doctors told her that the cancer has consumed her body.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2446697. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Before I Die” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.