Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive. Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they're ours to hold.

Austerity Baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'. Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. -- .

With half of the UK's grandparents aged under 65, being a granny is no longer all blue rinses, hip replacements and bingo. Happy, healthy and energetic, the modern gran is worlds away from the little old biddy stereotype. If you're a new gran, or about to become one, The New Granny's Survival Guide is your essential handbook for grandparenting. Packed full of sanity-saving advice from Gransnet - the number one online platform for grannies - this book covers everything you need to know to be a brilliant gran. With practical guidance, hilarious insights and fresh ideas, you'll discover: * Top tips for entertaining your grandchildren * Advice on building great relationships with in-laws * Guidance on how to cope with broken families, competitive grannies and difficult situations * Suggestions for how to juggle your own social life with being a hands-on gran With a foreword by Janet Ellis and full of wit and wisdom, The New Granny's Survival Guide is the perfect companion for today's dynamic grannies.

*** 'An honest and thoughtful memoir. Moving but, ultimately, full of hope. Beautiful.' KATE MOSSE 'Superb. Love & Care is a book about the unbreakable bonds of family, the cruelty of passing time and a love that never dies.' TONY PARSONS 'A beautiful, intimate story of love and understanding - candid and funny. This is a lyrical memoir of hope and forgiveness.' RAYNOR WINN, author of The Salt Path * Shaun is finally free of responsibilities to anyone but himself; single, with two grown up daughters, he is just embarking on a new life in a new country when he gets a call to say his father is dying. His mother has Parkinson's Dementia and is in a care home. Shaun faces a stark choice: should he give up his new-found freedom, or turn his back on the woman he'd fought so hard to protect, not least from his own father? Shaun's mother had loved and cared for her son all her life. Could he now do the same for her? 'A heart-warming, heart-wrenching, and beautifully humane account of loving and caring.' NICCI GERRARD, novelist and author of What Dementia Teaches Us About Love 'An insightful tale of care . . . this book needed to be written.' JO GOOD, BBC Radio London 'A vital subject, a really strong voice and, hurrah, humour makes this absorbing reading.' CAROLINE RAPHAEL, Radio 4's Book at Bedtime 'An eye-opening - and at times jaw dropping - account that will make you weep with its tenderness and compassion . . . A highly readable tale of redemption and a celebration of love's many hues.' PAUL BLEZARD, Love Reading 'Moving' DAILY MAIL