Grandad’s star
£7.99What if your guide to the cosmos starts to lose his way?
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Time shelter
£9.99In ‘Time Shelter’, an unnamed narrator meets Gaustine, a ‘flâneur through time,’ who has uncoupled his life from his contemporary reality, reading old news, wearing old clothes, haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. Gaustine is the mind behind the first ‘clinic for the past,’ an institution based in Zurich that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time and find comfort in their fading memories. Yet an increasing number of healthy people are interested in seeking out the clinic as a form of ‘time shelter,’ hoping to escape from the horrors of our present, a development that results in an unexpected conundrum, when the past beings to invade the present.
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The Suitcase
£9.99Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father’s papers. ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again’, warned her mother. Her father’s life had been a study in borders – exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer’s. The unopened suitcase seemed to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she found herself with the dilemma of two competing urges – wanting to know what’s in the suitcase, and wanting not to know. So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father’s and his family’s past.
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Unforgettable
£20.00In 2003, England won the Rugby World Cup. Steve Thompson was there, in England’s front row, at the heart of the match, and at the heart of the scrum – one of sport’s most destructive, repetitive impacts. But the triumphs came at a cost. When rugby union turned professional, Steve was plunged into a game where raw power meant everything. Today, he remembers nothing about playing in that final. In his words, watching the tape back is like watching a ghost. The years of hurt in an era of professional meat shields, and the culture of sucking up punishment and coming back for more, have taken a terrible toll. Steve has been diagnosed with early onset dementia, and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He is in his early forties. There are days when he doesn’t remember the names of his wife and four kids. But Steve doesn’t hate the game of rugby. He wants to change it.
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The Age Well Project
£10.99What does it take to have a healthy and joyful old age? Researchers say it’s not too late to make changes at 50 to get the ‘retirement years’ we want. But what should we change and how do we do it? Annabel Streets and Susan Saunders spent their 30s climbing the career ladder, having children and caring for elderly parents – all at the same time. By their 40s, they were exhausted, stressed, sleeping too little and rushing too much. They began to ask whether the prolonged ill health and dementia suffered by their parents was their inevitable future too – could they do anything to avoid requiring their own children to care for them in old age? Thus began ‘The Age-Well Project’.
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Man He Used To Be:DEMENTIA AND MY MAD DAD
£8.99Inadvertent cross dressing. Attempted murder. Jail break. A waltz at a funeral. A hernia the size of Guernsey. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, these are the moments that litter the messy road from cared-for to carer, a journey that Robyn Hollingworth finds herself on when she’s only 25 years old. Leaving London to return home to rural South Wales, Robyn finds that it’s her old life – same teddy bears resting on her pillow, their bodies tucked under the duvet; same view of the garages behind which she’d had her first cigarette and first kiss – but so much has changed. Her dad, the proud, charmingly intelligent, self-made man who made people laugh, was in the grip of early onset Alzheimer’s. His brilliant mind, which saw him building power stations and literally bringing light into the lives of others, had succumbed to darkness.
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Somebody I Used To Know
£10.99When Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 58, she had to say goodbye to the woman she once was. Her career in the NHS, her ability to drive, cook and run – the various shades of her independence – were suddenly gone. Yet Wendy was determined not to give in. She was, and still is, propelled by a need to live in the moment, never knowing which version of herself might surface tomorrow. In this phenomenal memoir, Wendy grapples with questions most of us have never had to consider. What do you value when loss of memory reframes what you have, how you have lived and what you stand to lose? What happens when you can no longer recognise your own daughters, or even, on the foggiest of days, yourself?
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Somebody I Used To Know
£16.99When Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 58, she had to say goodbye to the woman she once was. Her career in the NHS, her ability to drive, cook and run – the various shades of her independence – were suddenly gone. Yet Wendy was determined not to give in. She was, and still is, propelled by a need to live in the moment, never knowing which version of herself might surface tomorrow. In this phenomenal memoir, Wendy grapples with questions most of us have never had to consider. What do you value when loss of memory reframes what you have, how you have lived and what you stand to lose? What happens when you can no longer recognise your own daughters, or even, on the foggiest of days, yourself?
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Elizabeth is Missing
£9.99‘Elizabeth is missing’, reads the note in Maud’s pocket in her own handwriting. Lately, Maud’s been getting forgetful. She keeps buying peach slices when she has a cupboard full, forgets to drink the cups of tea she’s made and writes notes to remind herself of things. But Maud is determined to discover what has happened to her friend, Elizabeth, and what it has to do with the unsolved disappearance of her sister Sukey, years back, just after the war.
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Where Memories Go
£16.99Sally Magnusson cared with her two sisters for her mother, Mamie, during her long struggle with dementia, until her death in 2012. This moving and honest account of losing a loved one day by day to an insidious disease is both deeply personal and a challenging call to arms.