They Both Die at the End
In a near-future New York, a mysterious company called Death-Cast calls people in the small hours of the morning to deliver a single, unbearable message: today is the day they will die. On September 5th, two very different strangers get the call — Mateo Torrez, gentle and terrified of living, and Rufus Emeterio, grieving and running from trouble.
Through an app built to connect people living out their final day, the two find each other and decide to spend their last hours together. Over the course of one bittersweet day, they venture out into the city and into each other's lives, discovering that even a single day can hold a whole lifetime of connection, courage, and first love.
Adam Silvera's tender, wrenching novel asks how we might choose to live if we knew our time was almost up.
An anxious, housebound eighteen-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker who takes his Death-Cast call as the reason to finally leave his apartment and live.
A seventeen-year-old Cuban American in foster care who lost his parents and sister when their car went into the Hudson; he finds Mateo through the Last Friend app.
Known as Peck. Aimee's new boyfriend, who comes after Rufus following the fight Rufus starts with him.
Mateo's best friend, a young single mother to her daughter Penny.
Rufus's ex-girlfriend and a member of the Plutos, the foster-sibling group.
Publication order is They Both Die at the End (2017), The First to Die at the End (2022), The Survivor Wants to Die at the End (2025), and No One Knows Who Dies at the End (announced for 2026). Chronologically inside the story, The First to Die at the End is a prequel and comes first, with They Both Die at the End set later. Most readers start with publication order, since the prequel was written for an audience that already knows how Death-Cast works.
Yes. It was published in 2017 as a complete, self-contained novel, five years before any other Death-Cast book existed. Everything you need to understand Death-Cast, the Last Friend app and both narrators is inside this one book.
The first HarperTeen hardcover (ISBN 9780062457790, published 5 September 2017) runs 384 pages. Later printings and translations vary — the 2021 Collector's Edition is 328 pages, and the Brazilian Portuguese edition runs 416.