Hellooo everyone! Thank you for taking the time to read this. My name is Emily, and I currently live in Brighton, around 125 miles from Suffolk, where my mum, dad, and sister, Kate, still live. I usually see my parents about once every three months and my sister about twice a year. Honestly, one of … Continued
Non-fiction Looking After: A Portrait of My Autistic Brother By Caroline Elton (2025); Penguin “Meet Lionel, Caroline’s older brother. Born in the late 1940s, when little was known about autism […] When Lionel’s mother dies, and shortly after he is diagnosed with cancer, his two sisters struggle to fill the void – to become Lionel’s … Continued
An extract from “The Sibling” by Jools Abrams You can support Jools’ kickstarter campaign to publish the book here. Epilogue: Blackpool It is the first day of October, two days shy of my brother’s fifty second birthday, when we find ourselves on holiday again, the first without our parents, and the first time we are … Continued
“A sweet tale of sibling love, told without sentimentality” Summer BrotherBy Jaap Robben, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (2021); World EditionsReview by Pam Foley, adult sibling. Teenager Brian comes from a dysfunctional family; his parents are divorced and he lives with his conniving father in a trailer home, located in a remote Dutch … Continued
My youngest brother Reuben, who has Down’s Syndrome, suffered a breakdown 4 years ago. It was a form of regression that locked him into himself. After two years of moving between my parents and partner´s homes, as we were trying to get him better, he moved into a care home in Dorset, UK. Then the … Continued
My debut novel, Patience, was published in hardback in August. At its heart is a severely disabled woman, Patience, who understands everything, even though everyone around her thinks she can’t. It took me a long time to realise – well into the editing process for the novel, long after I’d been given a book deal … Continued
When my younger brother and closest friend, Sam, passed away just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a muscle-wasting disorder that effects hundreds of thousands of boys worldwide, I began writing to him from the passenger seat of grief. What started as frantic messages on my phone during a train ride to … Continued
“The Search for Still Waters is about one sibling’s journey to make sense of his feelings around the life and death of his sister, who had severe cerebral palsy. Aoife couldn’t walk or talk and her condition was little understood in 1980’s rural Ireland. When she passed away in 2011, her brother Alan was left … Continued