Health & Body
Health & Body
Health, Body and Chronic Illness Books
Supportive reading for chronic illness, pain, health anxiety, medical uncertainty, disability, sleep and living in a body that needs care.
36 focused booksPDF + EPUB£8.88 each
Health & Body
The Body Shame
There is a particular relationship that many people conduct, in private, for their entire lives, and it is one of the most painful relationships they will ever have.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Comparison to Who You Used to Be
You keep measuring yourself against a person who no longer exists: the person you used to be.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Fear of Dying
There is a fear that most of us keep at the edge of awareness, and that some of us cannot keep there at all: the fear of dying.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Health Anxiety
There is a particular kind of fear that takes the body as its subject and never quite lets go: the fear that something is seriously wrong with you, that the sensation you just noticed is the first sign of a grave illness, that beneath the surface of ordinary life a catastrophe is quietly…Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Night Panic
You wake in the dark, and terror already has you.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Pain That Will Not Stop
The pain does not stop.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Person Who Struggles With Sleep
Sleep, for you, has become a struggle.Read about this book →
Health & Body
Waking at 3am Every Night
You fall asleep well enough.Read about this book →
Health & Body
When Stress Lives in the Body
There is a kind of stress that has stopped being something you think and has become something you are, lodged in the muscles of your shoulders, the set of your jaw, the churn of your stomach, the shallowness of your breath, and if you carry it, you may have almost forgotten what it is to…Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Rooms That Filled Up
Winsome is sixty-seven, and she has not had anyone inside her house for eleven years. Not a friend, not a neighbour, not the grandchildren she loves and sees only at her daughter's. When the boiler failed two winters ago she went without heat for five weeks rather than let an engineer through the door.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Payment That Comes Later
Elspeth is forty-four, and nine years ago she was a secondary school teacher who ran half marathons. Last Tuesday she attended her nephew's christening. She was there for two hours, she sat down for most of it, and she was pleased with herself afterwards because she had managed it.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Face That Enters the Room
There is a second that some people live through hundreds of thousands of times, and most people never live through at all.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The People on the Stairs
There is a woman, somewhere near you, who is going blind, and who has begun to see things that are not there, and who has told nobody, and who lies awake believing she is losing her mind.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Flaw Only You Can See
Briar is thirty-two, and she has organised her entire life around a part of her face. Not a scar, not an injury, not anything a stranger would notice or a photograph would show, but something she sees with absolute clarity every time she looks, and which she has spent nineteen years trying to hide, correct, and stop thinking about.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Skin You Cannot Take Off
Fenella is forty-one and has had plaque psoriasis since she was nineteen. Last winter it covered a substantial part of her body. She was not sleeping, because of the itch and because of the flaking that meant changing the bedding every other day.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Hands That Will Not Rest
There is a woman with a small bald patch on the left side of her scalp, about the size of a two-pound coin, that no one has ever seen.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Moods That Are Not You
For three weeks, Iker did not really sleep, and he did not think he needed to. He felt magnificent. Ideas came faster than he could write them down, and all of them seemed brilliant; he started four projects, spent money he did not have, talked so fast that friends struggled to follow, and felt, for the first time in years, completely, gloriously alive.Read about this book →
Health & Body
When the World Went Quiet
There are two words that get said, kindly, to people who have asked you to repeat yourself twice, and they do more damage than anything else in this book.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Illness They Called Morning Sickness
Lowri is thirty-one and eleven weeks pregnant, and she has not kept food down for nine days. She has been to her general practitioner twice and to an emergency department once. She has been told that this is a normal part of pregnancy, that it usually settles by twelve weeks, that she should try ginger, and that she should eat little and often, which is advice given to a woman who cannot eat at all.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Man Who Knew the Word
Trevor knows the word. That is the first thing to understand, and it is the thing almost everyone gets wrong.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Word That Will Not Come
There is a man, and he has never said his own name.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Effort That Goes Nowhere
The invoice sat in a folder on Rory's desktop for eleven weeks. He had finished the work in March, good work, work the client was delighted with, and all that stood between him and being paid two thousand pounds was a document he had already half written and could complete in nine minutes. He knew this. He knew it every single day. And every day, for eleven weeks, he did not send it.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Gift You Cannot Repay
Redmond is fifty-two and has had a kidney for three years. He can tell you exactly where he was standing when the call came, what he was holding, and what the woman on the phone said.Read about this book →
Health & Body
What They Decide Before You Speak
Enid is fifty-three and has not seen a doctor in four years. She has a shoulder that has hurt since before the pandemic, a cough that comes back every winter, and a family history she knows she ought to mention to somebody.Read about this book →
Health & Body
You Look Completely Fine
Bryn is thirty-six. Two years ago a van came through a junction and his car went into a wall, and he was in hospital for eleven days and walked out of it. There is no scar anyone would notice, no stick, no chair, nothing that would make a stranger look twice.Read about this book →
Health & Body
When They No Longer Know You
Rurik is seventy-one, he lives in Stockport, and he has been married to Iyla for forty-five years.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Pain They Said Was Normal
Angharad is thirty-one and was diagnosed with endometriosis eight months ago. She has had the pain since she was thirteen.Read about this book →
Health & Body
Undetectable
Jonty is twenty-six, and eight months ago he sat in a clinic room and was told he had HIV. What he remembers of the next few minutes is not the information, which he could not take in, but a set of conclusions arriving all at once and with total authority.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Map of Every Toilet
Hester is forty-eight and she has a map in her head. It covers everywhere she goes regularly and a good deal that she does not, and it records the location of every accessible toilet, whether it requires a key, how long the queue tends to be, and how far it is from the entrance.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Shame Spiral
She sent the email at 11.04 and understood what she had done at 11.06.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Menopause Nobody Explained
Solenne is fifty-one, she runs a small veterinary practice in Shrewsbury, and she came to me because she thought she was losing her nerve.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Tests Came Back Normal
Cecilia heard the word normal so many times that it began to sound like an accusation.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Birth You Are Still In
Nia is thirty-one and her daughter is fourteen months old and perfectly well. Nia has not driven past the hospital since. She cannot watch anything involving a hospital scene, cannot tolerate being examined by a doctor, and has told her partner she does not want another child.Read about this book →
Health & Body
The Life Between Seizures
Nerys is thirty-four and has had epilepsy since she was nineteen. She had four seizures last year, which is to say that in a year of five hundred and twenty-five thousand minutes, roughly ten of them involved a seizure.Read about this book →
Health & Body