In C.S. Richardson's The End of the Alphabet (2007), an ordinary husband and wife face the most idiosyncratic of challenges - death. In writing the story, Richardson presents a genuinely touching, moving and thoughtful tale of a man's quest to rediscover life in his dying days. It's an uncomplicated novel about uncomplicated people going through a very complicated time.

Ambrose Zephyr and Zipper Ashkenazi (she kept her maiden name) live quietly contented and refreshingly simple lives. They compliment one another perfectly, work hard at their jobs, love each other deeply, and are quite satisfied with their world. Then, shortly after celebrating his 50th birthday, Ambrose is told by his doctor that he has a rare, incurable disease that will end his life in a month. A childhood fascination with geography and nice, ordered, structured lists leads Ambrose do to one of the few impulsive things in his life: he draws up an alphabetical list of places he wants to see before he dies, from A to Z. Some, like Paris, he's visited before (it's where he and Zipper met). Others, like the Great Pyramid of Khufu, he's always wanted to see. He wants to leave immediately, without informing his ad agency or any of his friends. Despite her reservations at the overnight nature of the journey, Zipper's only comment is that "Andalusia might be nicer this time of year".

As they travel across Europe, Ambrose and Zipper rediscover the places they visited when they were younger, all changed by time. Zipper wants to enjoy each location and the memories they bring; Ambrose wants to make progress on his list. She's scared of the rashness of the trip, what it's doing to Ambrose's health, and of being away from home for too long ("L is for London and home," she thinks. "Z is for Zipper. T is for terrified. H is for hopeless"). The trip comes to a premature end, with connections missed, letter-decided destinations skipped and Ambrose's health failing him. Ambrose and Zipper return to London, inform their co-workers and their friends, and make their final preparations as a married couple.

There's nothing dramatic about The End of the Alphabet. Even when Zipper and Ambrose argue, Richardson uses no punctuation or adjectives to describe or demarcate their dialogue. We fill the blanks in ourselves. Anything more would take away from the honesty and humanness of the book. "Less is more" is often a good idea to keep in mind when writing about everyday characters, and C.S. Richardson makes no mistake in presenting us with a simple book that is anything but simple.

On the face of it, The End of the Alphabet might look like The Bucket List, or one of those books that tells you of 1,000 places to go/see before you die. But, needless to say, Richardson's little book has so much more than that. It's a stark, moving love story, full of shared and unshared memories and wistful hopes for a future that will never happen, of angry bosses and talkative strangers on trains. While Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife gave us the heartbreaking "Time is nothing", Richardson pens the simple, and yet anything-but-simple "Luck had nothing to do with us."

The End of the Alphabet is a thought-proving book, asking questions about love and loyalty in the face of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mundaneness and the mortality of life. It is slow-paced, as books of this nature tend to be, and Richardson's eschew of punctuation in dialog sometimes makes following the story tougher than it should be. Get beyond that, however, and you're in an engrossing book that will stay close to you for a long time.