Search results for ""Author Graham Caveney""

Cancer, tumour, cancer. The words fizzle and dissolve into nothing like aspirin in water. I exist in the third person. The room is blue. When Graham Caveney was a child the word ''cancer'' was unspeakable, only uttered in jokes told by people too frightened to say the word in any other context. Now the boy with perpetual nervousness is a fifty-something man, and the oncologist in front of him is saying words evacuated of all meaning: Inoperable. Incurable. In this startling and deeply moving memoir from one of the great chroniclers of British working-class life, Graham Caveney charts a year of disease from diagnosis to past ''original sell-by-date''. Shot through with Northerness, tenderness, and Caveney''s trademark humour, The Body in the Library reflects on an unfinished lifetime filled with books and with love. What''s it like to realise that the books on your shelf will remain unread? That the book you are writing will be your last - that you have become your own deadline?

Read more less

If we’re talking agoraphobia, we’re talking books. I slip between their covers, lose myself in the turn of one page, re-discover myself on the next. Reading is a game of hide-and-seek. Narrative and neurosis, uneasy bedfellows sleeping top to toe.When Graham Caveney was in his early twenties he began to suffer from what was eventually diagnosed as agoraphobia. What followed were decades of managing his condition and learning to live within the narrow limits it imposed on his life: no motorways, no dual carriageways, no shopping centres, limited time outdoors.Graham’s quest to understand his illness brought him back to his first love: books. From Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, Ford Madox Ford, Emily Dickinson, and Shirley Jackson: the literary world is replete with examples of agoraphobics – once you go looking for them.On Agoraphobia is a fascinating, entertaining and sometimes painfully acute look at what it means to go through life with an anxiety disorder that evades easy definition.

Read more less

‘One of my favourite living writers: intelligent, lucid and, most impressive of all, funny’ - Jonathan CoeIf we’re talking agoraphobia, we’re talking books. I slip between their covers, lose myself in the turn of one page, re-discover myself on the next. Reading is a game of hide-and-seek. Narrative and neurosis, uneasy bedfellows sleeping top to toe.On Agoraphobia is a fascinating, entertaining and sometimes painfully acute look at what it means to go through life with an anxiety disorder that evades easy definition.When Graham Caveney was in his early twenties he began to suffer from what was eventually diagnosed as agoraphobia. What followed were decades of managing his condition and learning to live within the narrow limits it imposed on his life: no motorways, no dual carriageways, no shopping centres, limited time outdoors.Graham’s quest to understand his illness brought him back to his first love: books. From Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, Ford Madox Ford, Emily Dickinson, and Shirley Jackson: the literary world is replete with examples of agoraphobics – once you go looking for them.‘Intellectually curious, emotionally bracing and immensely erudite’ - Blake Morrison, The Guardian‘Captivating’ Richard Beard

Read more less