Scoot and Hannah are cystic fibrosis patients secluded in a modern sanitarium in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, alive past their expiration dates and unwilling to fade quietly. When Hannah leaves behind a final dare, Scoot follows her far beyond the tyranny of the waiting room, leaping from a Paris museum haunted by George Sand to a Polish cathedral where he steals the heart of Frédéric Chopin, and onward to the edge of Tbilisi, Georgia, pursued by spies, ghosts, and the literary underground. Told in singular, fever-bright prose, This Is How People Die is a mind-bending novel of love, vengeance, and deliverance--an absurd and luminous journey that asks what it means to keep living when mere survival is no longer enough.