Keeper: Living with Nancy – A Journey into Alzheimer’s by Andrea Gillies

Synopsis: Can our personalities be taken away from us? Are we more than just the sum of our memories? What exactly is the soul?

Three years ago, Andrea Gillies, a writer and mother of three, took on the care of her mother-in-law Nancy, who was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. This newly extended family moved to a big Victorian house on a headland in the far, far north of Scotland, where the author failed to write a novel and Nancy, her disease accelerated by change, began to move out of the rational world and into dementia’s alternative reality.

This book is a journal of life in this wild location, in which Gillies tracks Nancy’s unravelling grasp on everything that we think of as ordinary, and interweaves her own brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimer’s works. For the family at the centre of this drama, the learning curve was steeper and more interesting than anyone could have imagined.

2009 WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL WELLCOME PRIZE

Published: May 2009 | ISBN: 978-1906021658

Author’s Homepage: http://www.andreagillies.com
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/andreagillies

American Journal of Bioethics Book Review
The Guardian Book Review
Shibley Rahman Book Review
LA Times Book Review

Amazon Associates (SBAD gets a % of sales from books sold via these links, to help us do more work for science books)

Paperback Edition: Keeper: Living with Nancy