Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer - Couverture souple

When his mother Joan was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Rory MacLean and his wife Katrin took her into their home. For five months, as their life fragmented and turned inward, they fought both to resist and to accept the inevitable. Each gave vent to their emotions in different ways, but all three kept a diary. Heartbreakingly honest and deeply moving, Gift of Time is the story of those days, in the words of a son, his wife and his mother. Woven together into a poignant meditation on life and death, they illuminate the courage and dignity of one woman who confronted what we all must face. Threaded through with wisdom and guilt, anger and acceptance, the story is punctuated by a family wedding and the hope of new life, by bin-bags of old letters and books rediscovered, by the end of winter and the first signs of spring. Powerful, raw and urgent, this slender volume is above all a celebration of life. Capturing every moment of beauty and pain it acknowledges that what survives all of us is love.

Rory MacLean s seven books, including UK bestsellers Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon, have challenged and invigorated travel writing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an active member of English PEN. He now lives with his family in Berlin.