An important principle sits at the heart of this Handbook. In a world where around 1 million people die each week, there is no magic bullet, single intervention, or policy rollout that can ameliorate all the diverse forms of suffering that manifest themselves for those experiencing serious illness, disability, and frailty at the end of life. Global thinking and strategy can set a context for this, but local action, embedded within specific places and cultures, remains essential to the provision of palliative and end of life care as part of Universal Health Coverage (Ranabhat et al., 2023). We also take the view that this global challenge can only be met to the extent that we see these issues as profoundly inflected with social considerations, possibilities, and constraints. Our Handbook is about end of life care in society. It harnesses the social sciences and humanities to a set of problems that remain dominated by medicalised and managerial solutions within healthcare systems, and in so doing it takes us into a vast range of perspectives on something that is essential to social life itself: the human encounter with dying, death, and bereavement.