Milkshakes and morphine - Genevieve Fox

Honest, heartrending and full of humour, this is an extraordinary memoir about an unconventional childhood and the absurdities of the cancer experience. It is also, most importantly, a celebration of life.

When Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her throat, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock. I can't have cancer, she thinks. I've done my hair. But there is another reason she can't countenance cancer. She was orphaned by it at the age of nine.

Fox's story weaves together past and present as she recalls her rackety, unconventional childhood, while also facing the spectre of being lost to her young boys. Yet she confronts her treatment with the same sassy survival instinct that characterised her childhood misadventures. She takes life's precariousness and turns it on its head.

'Life-enhancing. Original and wonderful'
Sunday Telegraph

'Exquisite and tender'
SARAH PERRY