Not What The Good Fairy Promised

Twenty-four-year-old Joanna’s life flipped upside down at the taking of a phone call. News of her sister’s near-death in a fire triggered the onset of bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that Joanna would have to manage for the rest of her life.

A scholarship to Cambridge, with three years to get her degree, had ended in this. Joanna’s high hopes, and her father’s fierce ambitions for her, now lay in tatters. A glowing future of any description lay beyond her grasp as she struggled to get to grips with her new and utterly foreign reality. Where was she going in life now?

Not What the Good Fairy Promised is the heart-warming story of a young woman’s experience of terrifying breakdown, psychiatric hospital, and the stigma of mental illness. There is the battle with everyday life, with its frightening demand that she re-discover her identity – her selfhood – while struggling to survive and earn a living, yearning for something worthwhile to fill the hours of nine to five. This is a tale of experiencing, and overcoming, serious mental illness, of driving ahead to forge a new and unlooked for future – and what the Good Fairy did deliver.

Nobody Does It Better Than Me: The Story of Alma

This is a book that will hold the reader’s attention from start to finish. It’s a story of courage, determination, control, anger, jealousy, and love. Alma, the main protagonist, was injured during the Blitz in East London when half her house fell on top of the air-raid shelter also killing her father and her sister. That experience coloured the rest of her life.Alma and the family moved to Poplar (‘Call the Midwife’ country) in 1947. By 1951, they’d been re-housed to a Council House in Grundy Street where they stayed until 1981. East end life was important to them, but Alma always had aspirations to move back to Hornchurch in Essex and the surrounding areas where most of her family lived. George, Alma’s husband, was born and bred in Poplar in the East End – a true Cockney. His attitude was, ‘I’ll leave the East End feet first!’ However, his daughter Linda’s medical needs meant that she could no longer climb the stairs after major back surgery. So they had to move and Alma’s ambition was realised, but little did they know that Linda would eventually meet and fall in love with Ralph, and that despite her disabilities, she would get married and achieve great things with her husband.

No Room to Breathe

This is the personal story of a psychologist living with an emotionally abusive partner and her struggles, both personal and institutional, in leaving. No Room to Breathe: A Memoir of Emotional Abuse, Motherhood, and Resilience is a cautionary tale that reveals the often publicly unseen and underestimated dynamics and patterns of emotionally-abusive relationships. It also highlights their potentially far-reaching consequences, particularly when attempts are made to leave the relationship, and children are used as pawns.

As a licensed therapist for more than 30 years, Dr Coha worked with many challenging people. When it came to her personal life however, her professional credentials as a clinical psychologist and clinical social worker did not help her to avoid entering into an emotionally-controlling relationship. Loretta’s experience speaks to many people’s lives. Her story covers many complicating factors and powerful forces, such as health, children, the involvement of the judicial system, and the fact that her partner was a public figure. Although her significant other was a woman, the life-impacting results are the same for anyone who has ever been involved with a controlling partner. No Room to Breathe is ultimately an inspiring account of a woman using her personal strength to break away and create a new, healthy life for herself and her children.

No More Blood

Blood is the life-force of every human being (and other animals). When it leaks out of our blood vessels, we die. When the aorta, the biggest blood vessel in the body, bursts, death usually comes quickly but for a lucky few it’s not instantaneous. For them, survival is possible with emergency surgery. When a blockage in a blood vessel stops the blood from flowing, the deprived part of the body malfunctions and may decay if an operation to relieve the blockage is not performed. When Peter Harris first became a consultant vascular surgeon in the 1980s, the operations were big and bloody. When he finished in 2012, scalpels and saws had been largely superseded by bloodless needle-puncture procedures guided by X-ray images on a television screen. The evolution of the technology that made this possible is told primarily through the experiences of patients and includes vivid and, at times, harrowing descriptions of their operations and aftermath. Accounts of his own trials and tribulations and the good times are set against the troubled backdrop of the NHS starting in Broadgreen Hospital on the outskirts of Liverpool in 1979 and ending at University College Hospital in London in 2012.

Nationality: Medicine

'Medicine transcends all barriers; it knows no frontiers, it respects all credos and, most importantly, it treats all human beings as equals. Despite the tremendous socio-economic inequalities that I encountered and experienced in each one of the four countries where I’ve lived and practised medicine (Peru, United States, Spain and the UK), I’ve always been proud to find that the Hippocratic Oath is unwavering and equally applied to all citizens. My identity never came from having a certain nationality, speaking a specific language or even from my family genealogy. It came (and still does) from the set of values that the medical profession professes and that I, as a doctor, hold close to my heart. These values are the building blocks of society; without them, everything else crumbles. My “nationality” is medicine and my allegiance is to the human race. The lives and the clinical cases in this book are all real and they tell the story of how the Hippocratic Oath prevails even in the most challenging conditions. They remind us that no matter how much adversity lies before us (poverty, socio-economic instability, lack of resources, etc.), with sufficient effort, creativity and perseverance, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. After all, altruism – the bedrock of medicine – is free of charge, independent of location and always available for anyone who’s willing to use it.'
Dr Carlo Canepa

My Young Life and Experience after 1945

“Mum, where is Dad, has he gone to bed?”

I didn't know where my dad had gone because he just disappeared. I should really have got used to my dad getting drunk because he seemed to spend a lot of time drinking. But when I think about it, his drunkenness didn’t bother me too much: it was the punching of my mum and myself that hurt me the most.

However, I did find time to have fun with a couple of friends that I had. The secret agent games that I invented from time to time coincided with the true-life games and excitement that I found along the way.

My Wife’s Canary

Miles Maskell has lived a varied and adventurous life, and has travelled widely as amply demonstrated in his anecdotes. He has been a City of London wine merchant, owned two restaurants and a champagne bar, and eventually created a company letting top-of-the-range properties in southern France on behalf of their owners.

He has climbed mountains, shot wild boar in Poland, piloted a 4-seater aircraft of which he was a part-owner, parachuted in New Zealand, and ridden the Cresta Run in St Moritz. He is also a sculptor.

Written as a lighthearted and easy-to-read series of anecdotes, this is his autobiography and recounts some of the more entertaining experiences of his life to date, as well as a number of amusing incidents encountered by his relations and closest friends.

He was born in London where he continues to live, having been at school in Cape Town and then at Cambridge University.

My Sage

Clouds pass and so do our opportunities… 

Have you ever met a sage? 

Can you see the extraordinary in your daily life? 

Did you observe the spark of clairvoyance in the modern days?

A sage can revolve you to experience the extraordinary and you will then see the daily miracle. 

A sage can give you many tales to keep a secret with a miraculous edge. 

In this book, you will find some of these extraordinary events from real-life experiences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

My Parents' Daughter

The mob bullying of an accomplished and expert senior secondary English teacher and Co-ordinator in a Victorian state school in Australia is re-told in My Parents’ Daughter giving a vivid insight into the hellish world of its victim. This first part of Victoria Hartmann’s Memoir is about workplace bullying by her four male principals, plus others, in the new millennium. This otherwise dark theme is re-told with good humour. Victoria’s intention is for her reader to laugh a lot outwardly but be moved inwardly to further discussions about this sinister blight on our democracies; perhaps even be moved to action and further the cause.

It shows how Victoria’s employer – the Department of Education, plus associated bodies, dealt with Victoria’s injuries and complaints. It questions accountability and equity or rather the lack there of. This memoir tackles head on psychological bullying and spot lights the notion that authority does not equate to honesty thus our need for external checks on governmental power brokers. The memoir’s intention is to enlighten and demands justice and change leading to prevention. It is a courageous effort by a courageous woman who owes everything to her genetics and upbringing. Please note that all names are fictitious but the content word for word true.

My Little Ship, Forever at Sea

Polina was brought to New Zealand as a 10-year-old by her parents, from the cold Sheremetyevo airport to the heat and exotic green vegetation of the Land of the Long White Cloud. Her life has been lived in a dual form ever since – all this time she continued to hold onto the expansive wild landscapes of Russia, while marvelling at the tug of the Piha coast and the bright clean sunlight. Polina explores this duality as a hybrid identity of an immigrant, paying attention to both her own story while also exploring those of Auckland’s Russian community, her immediate family and friends. She shows that starting life from a zero, accumulating possessions and learning a new language are not the most vital things for an immigrant, but rather in her experience it is a deeper connection with the surrounding environment which opens a true and genuine conversation with the spirit of the land. This spirit has hummed a tune for Polina’s integration into the new society, under the auspices of her parents and other figures, whom she observed and had known, to now present her story about one of today’s most vital topics – immigration and identity.

My Life, My Way. The Conditioning.

The meanderings and twists and turns of real-life told through the poetry of a crazy mind… or am I sane? You decide…

What if I told you all is not as it seems…

What if I told you this is the land of dreams…

Dive inside, come on, let’s see… the twists and turns of the life we see.

My Life As a Nomad

Mary Smith was born and raised in a country behind the Iron Curtain. She lived in a tiny apartment and shared a bedroom with her parents during the frigid winter months. She wore school uniforms and red pioneer ties. She ate variations of potato dishes, stood in line for a loaf of bread, carried heavy blocks of ice during the hot summer days, played hide-and-seek with the children in the building, and thought that life was wonderful. Her nonconformist parents, however, talked of a world beyond the Iron Curtain and planned to escape to a place where they thought they would find freedom.

My Life As a Nomad recounts Mary’s peregrinations through five countries on three continents that began in 1964. What started as an adventure full of promises, evolved as a perennial search for a “home” amid the customs and traditions of an unfamiliar world.

“Adam was but human – this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”

Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

“The quality of mercy... is twice bless'd;

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes; ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.”

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare