Before I Say Goodbye.
The Grapes of Wrath.
C because Cowards get cancer
As far as John Diamond was concerned, cancer happens to other people. A columnist who is paid handsomely for spouting off each week about whatever is on his mind, he undergoes tests for the lump in his neck and, rather than panicking, sees it as a potentially interesting anecdote. "I imagined myself in a week or two's time not as someone who had been diagnosed as having cancer but as someone who had had a close brush with cancer - who'd been through all the tests and then at the very last minute been given the all clear. If anything it sounded even more heroic than the real thing". By this point Diamond had had cancer for more than a year.
"C" is, of course, about cancer - what it is, what it feels like to receive the diagnosis one evening as you're watching Eastenders, how it feels to lose four stone and most of your tongue. Subtitled "because cowards get cancer too", the book makes no attempt to portray Diamond as some brave, heroic figure and describes his twisted pleasure as he uses his illness as a weapon at dinner parties, his frequent outbursts of impotent rage and the often appalling way he treats his wife during his convalescence
Remind Me Who I Am, Again
In 1993 Linda Grant's mother, Rose, was diagnosed with multi-infarct dementia. With Roses's memory deteriorating, a whole world was in the process of being lost. In this work she looks at the question of identity, memory and autonomy that dementia raises.
Lucky
Lovley Bones
A boy called it
My Sister's Keeper