Keeping Mum : What If Telling Lies Is the Best Way to Be True?

They say you should walk towards the light. Well I didn't. I fled. I ran away from it. I pushed the light back and it splintered in my hands like glass. I thought I might be dead because there was no blood. I raged, I wept. I shouted. There was no pain. I screamed. There was no noise. It wasn't time. It wasn't right. But still, I did not know that I was dead. Still, I hoped that I was not. I wasn't ready... Has it been done before? We don't think so. Dual authorship is one thing, but fifteen authors? That's more like a writing team for a soap opera or a big TV series than a single novel. And who are the Dark Angels? Well, they're not bikers or Goths or heavy metal rockers, but an eclectic bunch of writers who have come together through the Dark Angels creative writing programme. Challenging themselves to come up with ideas for a collective novel, they chose the model of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying , a novel told from the viewpoint of many characters with each chapter in a different voice. Gathered together in a Scottish country house in the coldest March on record, the Dark Angels started to create the characters to tell a story about a woman who dies in a Scottish country house – and whose family decides to transport her body back to London via a few special, possibly secret-laden locations. What they came up with is a stonking good story. By turns poetic, comic, psychological, philosophical, and moving. Full of secrets and lies, it's an adventure in writing. "At 3am I was startled awake by the opening of the stairgate. Leaping out of bed I found Mum, clothes on over her pyjamas, grumbling she was fed up of being moved from pillar to post and was going home." When her mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Marianne Talbot decided she couldn't put her into a care home. Instead, for five years, she looked after her mum in her own home. For nearly three of those years she chronicled for the readers of Saga Magazine Online the fears and frustrations, the love and the laughter, and the tears and the traumas of caring. Now, in this heart warming book, you too can meet Marianne, Mum, and the appalling Fatcat. You will also find plenty of practical tips for caring for someone with dementia and on staying sane whilst doing so, a resources and useful contacts section and Marianne's reflections on caring from a distance, and on when caring comes to an end. Written for anyone, anywhere, who has anything to do with dementia or with caring; in reading it you will know you are not alone Fifteen authors, one rip-roaring novel - a unique reading experience...