BOOKS


chef for work, things get cooking. London-based rom-com about a young Jewish woman struggling to reconcile her family’s hopes for her future with her own. Crew is the alter- ego of autistic author Nicole Burstein.


Memoir


Riva Lehrer Golem Girl Little, Brown, 7th October, £12.99, pb, 9780349014838 Born with spina bifida in 1958, artist Riva Lehrer grew up feeling broken, worthless. This Barbellion Prize-winning memoir tells the story of how finding community with other disabled creatives helped her to understand her body and disability as sites of resistance and possibility, not as things to be fixed.


Category Spotlight The Disability Issue


catalysed by a conversa- tion in a bar between two men who saw Cooper Jones’ life as a tragedy. Pulitzer Prize-winning Cooper Jones unpicks her own way of seeing things, and invites readers to share her vision of disabled beauty.


after which he went on to win an Overcoming Adversity award.


Ed Jackson Lucky HQ, 4th August, £9.99, pb, 9780008423407 Billed as “an inspirational story of triumph over adversity against the odds”, this memoir recalls how rugby player Jackson was paralysed aged 28 after diving into a swim- ming pool. Against the odds, he recovered the ability to walk, then set up a charity to support people with spinal injuries.


Diane Abbott A Woman Like Me Viking, 2nd June, £18.99, hb, 9780241536414 Abbott is well known as the first Black woman elected to Parliament. During the 2017 General Election campaign, she revealed she has type II diabetes, and was open about the pressures placed on her body by campaigning. This memoir is Abbott’s first book.


Sara Gibbs Drama Queen Headline, 6th January, £10.99, pb, 9781472274366 Comedy scriptwriter Gibbs had been called many things in her life, but more often than anything else, a drama queen. She was always making a fuss, people said. Then, aged 30, she found out she wasn’t a drama queen at all, but autistic. A funny, honest memoir of coming to an understanding with oneself.


Josie George A Still Life: A Memoir Bloomsbury, 3rd February, £8.99, pb, 9781526612007 A memoir written mostly in bed, A Still Life charts a year in the life of artist and writer Josie George, who has been chronically and often debilitatingly ill since childhood, without a definite diagnosis. She has learnt, through her life, to take things slowly, a useful lesson for us all.


Chloé Cooper Jones Easy Beauty Virago, 7th April, £16.99, hb, 9780349013824 This beautiful, lyrical memoir examines the abled gaze from a disabled perspective,


36 24th September 2021


Sophie Morgan Driving Forwards: A Journey of Resilience and Empowerment After Life-Changing Injury Sphere, 17th March, £16.99, hb, 9780751582246 Aged 18, Morgan crashed her car and was paralysed from the waist down. Driving Forward is the memoir of how she changed her expectations to meet her changed circumstances, and turned adversity to opportunity. Morgan is an award- winning disability advo- cate and TV presenter.


Nonfiction


hearing/deaf family gives a personal slant to her examination of Bell’s project to eliminate Deaf culture and language, and its long shadow.


“masking”: of hiding visi- ble autistic traits beneath a veneer of neurotypical- ity. Devon Price is a social psychologist, professor and proud autistic person. In this book, they make a case for radical authentic- ity, for unmasking our true selves.


complexity of recovery (or lack of recovery) after a traumatic brain injury. These essays make the invisible and often-overlooked effects of concussion visible. Shelagh Rogers says: “This book creates affir- mation, validation, and understanding”.


Maud Rowell


Diane Driedger (ed) Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader Inanna, 30th November, £14.95, pb, 9781771338332 This collection of articles, poetry, essays, and visual art brings together the diverse voices and experiences of disabled women from Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, the UK and Zimbabwe (and more), in a follow-up to the original collection Living the Edges.


Ben Parkinson Losing the Battle, Winning the War: How We Can All Defy the Odds We’re Given Little, Brown, 26th May, £8.99, pb, 9780751580259 In September 2006, Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson was stationed in Afghanistan when his transport hit a mine. He had 37 injuries, including a brain injury, and lost both his legs. This is the story of his injury, and recovery,


Wes Ely Every Deep-Drawn Breath: An Intensive Care Doctor’s Notes on Healing Scribe, 14th October, £16.99, pb, 9781913348670 A doctor’s record of working in Intensive Care, focusing on Ely’s uncon- ventional methods to limit harm to ICU patients, and help them recover—all the more relevant in the times of Covid. Disability adjacent. All profits from the book will go to a fund for ICU survivors.


Katie Booth The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness Scribe, August, £25, hb, 9781913348403 This revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell will change everything you thought you knew about the telephone. The author’s experience of growing up in a mixed


Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness 404 Ink, 28th October, £7.50, pb, 9781912489428 Journalist and writer Maud Rowell went blind aged 19 while travelling. This book, part of a new series of compact non- fiction titles from 404 Ink, aims to dispel myths about blindness, blind people and their daily lives, informing readers about the realities of living with sight loss from lived experience.


Keith Kahn-Harris The Babel Message/ A Love Letter to Language Icon, 4th November, £12.99, hb, 9781785787379 The only book in this preview which pays close, exacting attention to the language of the Kinder Egg, this is, as the title tells us, a love letter to language. Kahn-Harris delves into the histories of modern languages, asking what brings them together, rather than what sets us apart.


Evie Meg


My Nonidentical Twin: What I’d Like You to Know About Living with Tourette’s Sphere, 28th October, £14.99, hb, 9780751584066 A chatty, personable memoir about living with Tourette’s from Evie Meg— known on TikTok as “This Trippy Hippy”—which also acts as a guide to the condition. Funny, warm and encouraging, this will be an important and useful book for disabled and non-disabled readers alike.


Devon Price Unmasking Autism Octopus, 7th April, £16.99, hb, 9781800960541 An exploration of the many manifestations of neurodiversity, focused on the phenomenon of


Blair Imani Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability & More Ten Speed Press, 26th October, £12.99, pb, 9781984860545 An accessible guide to intersectionality and a host of social issues, designed to help learners of all levels understand terms and their backgrounds, and to get smarter about social justice of all kinds. Historian and activist Imani identifies as queer, Black, bisexual and Muslim.


Jan Nisbet with Nancy R Weiss Pain and Shock in America: Politics, Advocacy, and the Controversial Treatment of People with Disabilities Brandeis University Press, 8th October, £32, hb, 9781684580743 A history of the notorious Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, and the fight to ban the use of electric shock treatment and other severe


punishments on disabled children and adults. This is a historical case study that remains sadly relevant, as aversion therapies are still encouraged in many places.


Harry Parker Hybrid Humans: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine Profile, 3rd February, £14.99, hb, 9781788163101 Harry Parker lost both legs to an IED in Afghanistan in 2009. In this book, Parker grafts his own experience to that of innovators from DIY biohackers to experimental robotics engineers to ask what happens when human bodies become hybridised with technology—when we become cyborg.


E D Morin & Jane Cawthorne (eds) Impact: Women Writing After Concussion University of Alberta Press, 15th October, pb, £20.99, 9781772125818 In this essay collection, 21 women writers discuss the effect of concussion on their lives, and the


Elinor Cleghorn Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World Orion, July, pb, out now, £14.99, 978474616867 Informed by her own long quest for diagnosis of Lupus, Cleghorn traces an alternative history of medicine through a lineage of false assump- tions made about women’s pain and disor- ders to work out how we got to the situation we’ve inherited today, charted so keenly in other recent books.


John D Kemp


Disability Friendly: How to Move from Clueless to Inclusive Wiley, 12th April, £21.99, hb, 9781119830092 Disability activist Kemp breaks down the


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