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Dear Life by Rachel Clarke review – somewhere towards the end [21 Jan 2020|07:00am]
A palliative care specialist offers a tender meditation on how people confront their final days

Dying is what we do. Rich and poor, quickly or slowly, in pain or in peace, young and old and somewhere in between, we all come to our own sure extinction. But often, our own dying is not what we talk about, prepare for, live with or recognise as always waiting for us: “Nothing more true,” as Philip Larkin wrote in his terror-struck Aubade.

In part because of this human instinct to deny what is certain and yet can feel like a scandalous impossibility, dying can be a terrifying, farcical, violent and lonely business. It’s become easier to live longer, harder to die well. Death most often takes place in a hospital ward, frequently alone in a curtained bed, or with doctors heroically striving to bring the flickering self back from the brink: drugs and knives and needles and machines and masks and blood and the breath and agony and the heart failing and the body not allowed to give up. For hospitals are largely places of cure, of restoring people to life and to time. Death is a medical failure.

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Poetry book of the month: Arias by Sharon Olds – review [21 Jan 2020|09:00am]
Sharon Olds’s brilliant new collection, an exploration of intimacy and estrangement, is her most moving yet

The American Sharon Olds goes where many poets would fear to tread and others not dream of treading. Like a curious child, she wanders past No Entry signs on to private land. Or, at home, she alights on subjects not expecting attention.

In Go, she writes about finding an ex-lover’s hair on top of a hard-boiled egg in her fridge. Ridiculous, you might say – but she makes a super-charged poem of it. She is flirtatious, outlandish, deeply serious.

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Dedicated followers: collectors of book inscriptions share their notes [21 Jan 2020|10:13am]

The words left in books by their previous owners can tell intriguing stories – but do they enrich or sour the next reader’s experience?

The book tells you a story before you’ve read a word of it. On the cover is Charlie Brown, carrying a baseball bat and dejectedly dragging his mitt, above the title in emphatic, meme-ish font: “WINNING MAY NOT BE EVERYTHING, BUT LOSING ISN’T ANYTHING!” And on in the inside leaf, written in pen in looping cursive: “I love you.”

The pocket-sized book of Peanuts cartoons by Charles M Schulz, charming in clashing red and orange, is one of Wayne Gooderham’s favourites. “Everything about it works,” he says, leaning over the cafe table laden with his finds. “Charlie Brown on the cover, the title of the book, the sentiment inside – the fact that it’s been given away.”

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My greatest honor: I wrote a book that touched people living in poverty [21 Jan 2020|11:15am]

My own story – of leading an invisible life in poverty – helped others feel seen. If only politicians could read it, too

Three weeks after my first book was published, I sat on a ragged couch in a greenroom at a studio in San Francisco, working furiously on two cough drops in my mouth, debating whether to chew them.

On a small table in front of me was a paper cup containing tea too hot to drink. My husband, who’d joined me through most of my book tour, didn’t complain about my sweaty hand clutching his. I’d finished my 17th and final event on the road that afternoon and looked forward to having an evening off before flying home the next day, but my publicist had emailed about one last thing: a live interview with Ana Cabrera of CNN.

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Half of a Yellow Sun ends abruptly - but at the right time [21 Jan 2020|11:47am]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ends her novel soon after the end of the Biafran war, though the trauma is far from over for her characters. With spoilers

It’s a historical fact that the Biafran war lasted from 1967 until 1970. But like all apparently objective historical facts, this one feels more subjective the more you look at it. For whom, exactly, did the war end? Active hostilities may have ended on 15 January 1970, but politically, Biafran independence remains a fraught question. Meanwhile, one of war’s tragedies is always that it never really ends for those who survive. Ceasefires cannot erase scars, loss or memories.

This lack of closure must have presented a challenge for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she wrote Half of a Yellow Sun. On the one hand, there’s the natural breaking-off point at the declaration of peace. On the other, there’s the knowledge that to accurately represent the experience of her characters is to acknowledge the fact that they can never really leave their suffering behind.

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Ballet Shoes gets 21st-century update from Carrie Hope Fletcher [21 Jan 2020|02:42pm]

Noel Streatfeild’s children’s classic about orphaned sisters preparing for a life on the stage is being reimagined by the writer, actor and internet star

Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s classic tale of three adopted girls hoping for – or dreading – a life on the stage, is to be reimagined for the modern era by writer and actor Carrie Hope Fletcher.

Endorsed by Streatfeild’s estate, Fletcher’s novel will, like Ballet Shoes, follow three adopted children. But while Ballet Shoes’ Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil are brought together when they are adopted by the eccentric elderly palaeontologist they know as Great Uncle Matthew, Fletcher’s children are found by the eccentric pebble collector Great Aunt Maude. They live in a rickety old London theatre, rather than the home on the Cromwell Road inhabited by the Fossils, and Fletcher has also made one of them – the ballet dancer of the three – a boy.

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