What Dementia Teaches Us About Love

By (author) Gerrard Nicci
Description

A SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

''Essential reading about love, life and care'' Kate Mosse

''Dementia is all around us, in our families and in our genes; perhaps in our own futures. If it''s not you or me, it''s someone we love.''

After her own father''s death from dementia, the writer and campaigner Nicci Gerrard set out to explore the illness that now touches millions of us, yet which we still struggle to speak about. What does dementia mean, for those who live with it, and those who care for them?

This truthful, humane book is an attempt to understand. It is filled with stories, both moving and optimistic: from those living with dementia to those planning the end of life, from the scientists unlocking the mysteries of the brain to the therapists using art and music to enrich the lives of sufferers, from the campaigners battling for greater compassion in care to the families trying to make sense of this ''incomprehensible de-creation of the self''. It explores memory, language, identity, ageing and the notion of what it truly means to care. And it asks, how do we begin to value those who become old, invisible, forgotten? What do we owe them, and each other as humans? What, in the end, really matters?

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Immensely powerful . . . an incisive and compelling read. Gerrard, a crime novelist and former journalist, visits the "fresh hell" of hospitals across the UK, and interviews sufferers and those whose lives have been indelibly shaped by the diagnosis of a loved one . . . As well as being part-memoir and part-reportage, What Dementia Teaches Us About Love is also a great part philosophical inquiry into the nature of self and what it is to be human.
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Essential reading about love, life and care
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An extraordinarily luminous book, at once terribly sad and frightening but also somehow hopeful and energising.
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Nobody has written on dementia as well as Nicci Gerrard in this new book. Kind, knowing and infinitely useful
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Gerrard ranges widely and wisely, raising questions about what it is to be human and facing truths too deep for tears
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This is a tender, lyrical, profound, urgent book . . . Gerrard has penned a treatise on what it is to be human
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Evocative and powerful, shining a light on a world which is often hidden and misunderstood
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Gerrard writes beautifully, encyclopaedically and with humanity
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Nicci Gerrard exudes understanding of the breadth, scale and complexity of the dementias and the challenges they pose for society. Yet she communicates simply, personally and practically as if speaking individually to each of us
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Nicci Gerrard writes with power, insight, empathy and extraordinary beauty about the world of dementia . . . and demonstrates how we can address the fear, despair and ignorance that has accompanied its spread
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Immensely powerful . . . shot through with insights. Gerrard''s book is an elegant yet devastating interrogation into this fatal loss of self, and is part-reportage, part-philosophical inquiry, but, above all, intensely personal.
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A profound and powerful exploration of how society interprets and deals with a health challenge that will only deepen over the coming decades
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Wonderful...she brings their stories so vividly to life that although the subject is sorrowful, her book is hard to put down...not only good but also necessary reading
Biographical note

Nicci Gerrard is a writer and campaigner, a celebrated novelist