70. My Brother’s Name is Jessica- John Boyne This is a children’s book but, as the author is John Boyne, it is one of very high quality. The main plot is about a trans teenager, told from the point of view of her younger brother. Their mother is a politician, which adds an interesting subplot.
71. Unnatural Causes- Dr Richard Shepherd I’d had this memoir of a forensic pathologist reserved on BorrowBox for a while, and when it was my turn to read it I wasn’t quite sure if it was the book for me at the moment. However, I decided to launch in regardless and I found it very interesting. Dr Shepherd has performed 23 000 post mortems during his career, including many on babies, and has been involved in a number of high profile cases such as the Stephen Lawrence murder, the victims of Harold Shipman and (after the fact) the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. He has worked on many large-scale tragedies such as the Hungerford massacre, the Clapham rail disaster, the Marchioness tragedy, 9/11, the 2005 London bombings and the Bali bombings. The bodies are sometimes described in quite gruesome detail (decomposition, mummification, stab wounds, loose body parts separated from corpses, hands cut off Marchioness victims to be sent away for fingerprinting etc.) but I found this strangely compelling. Dr Shepherd was also involved with long range planning for disaster management: one phrase (which was something like ‘We would sit around drinking coffee and wondering how we would cope with a huge flu pandemic’) was quite chilling. He was candid about the effects of his job on his private life- he neglected his family at times, his first marriage broke down and he later suffered from PTSD. This is a fascinating book, but it is probably not for everyone.
72. Bookworm- Lucy Mangan I live alone: upon realising that it will be a long time before I can have a hug, I turned to this audiobook (the ebook of which I have previously read) to do the job instead. It did not disappoint!
73. Innocent- Cathy Glass Another fostering memoir, this one was slightly different to Glass’s usual cases as the children were much younger (3.5 yrs and 18 months at the beginning). Also unusually, there was a medical mystery involved, which I solved immediately.
74. Eye Can Write- Jonathan Bryan A short memoir of a boy with cerebral palsy, written with help from his mother who covers his younger years. As he does not have control over his limbs, Bryan’s system of writing is laborious: he has to look at each letter individually and a clever gadget decodes it all. His education has been a regular mixture of special school, mainstream school and home education. He is scathing about the special school for not seeing his academic potential and for not teaching him or his classmates to read. He has started a high-profile campaign ‘Teach Us Too’ and is evangelical about both this and his Christian faith. This memoir is beautifully written and very inspiring.