On seventeen occasions awardwinning novelist Maggie OFarrell has stared death in the faceand lived to tell the tale. In this astonishing 1 Sunday Times bestelling memoir by the author of Hamnet she shares the neardeath experiences that have punctuated and defined her life The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And most terrifying of all an ongoing daily struggle to protect her daughter from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to lifes myriad dangers. Here OFarrell stiches together these discrete encounters to tell the story of her entire life. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion she captures the perils running just beneath the surface and illuminates the preciousness beauty and mysteries of life itself. show more