In April 1988, 65-year-old Lily Bloom quickly succumbs to cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital. But after life there's death. Scabrous, vicious and unpleasant in life, Lily is not improved by death. Guided by an aborigine named Phar Lap Jones, she is transported by a Greek Cypriot minicab driver to the North London dead neighborhood of Dulston to inhabit a basement flat with the company of a pop-obsessed foetus, her dead foul-mouthed son and three gruesome creatures, Rude Boy. She has to find somethi g to do with her time and is introduced to the 12-step Personally Dead meetings, and she watches over her living daughters - the cold, ambitious Charlotte, and her favorite, the heroin-addicted Natasha.