It’s been a tough two years since the pandemic took hold, but that doesn’t mean we need to go into 2022 too downheartened that COVID-19 is still ever-present in our lives. In his new book, Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, Gavin Francis explores how time, rest and recuperation is vital in rejuvenating ourselves.

 

Extract taken from Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence By Gavin Francis Published by Wellcome

 

The word rehabilitation comes from the Latin habilis, ‘to make fit’, and carries the sense of restoration: ‘to stand, make, or be firm again’. The aim of rehabilitation, then, was to make someone as fit as they can be, to be able to stand firmly on their own two feet. And though recovery was the clinicians’ ultimate aim, it’s curious that the words ‘recovery’ and ‘convalescence’ are generally absent from the index of medical textbooks. As long ago as the 1920s, in her essay ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf wrote that we lack a mode of writing about illness, that it is ‘strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. A century on, her assertion no longer holds true: we do have a literature of illness. But I’d argue that we still lack a literature of recovery.

The medicine I was trained in often assumes that once a crisis has passed, the body and mind find ways to heal themselves – there’s almost nothing more to be said on the matter. But after nearly twenty years as a GP I’ve often found that the reverse is true: guidance and encouragement through the process of recovery can be indispensable. Odd as it seems, my patients often need to be granted permission to take the time to recover that they need. Illness is not simply a matter of biology, but one of psychology and sociology. We fall ill in ways t...

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We have been excited here at BooksfromScotland since we heard Louise Welsh was working on a sequel to her fabulous debut The Cutting Room. David Robinson finds that the follow-up, The Second Cut, has been well worth the wait.

 

The Second Cut By Louise Welsh Published by Canongate

 

Twenty years is a long time to wait for a sequel, but so completely does Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut  shred the clichés of crime fiction, and so convincingly and freshly does it swathe Glasgow in her beyond-noir aesthetic, that it is well worth the wait.

Clichés (or rather, their absence) first. In most crime novels, the beginning is clear enough: there’s been a murder, the police are on the case, a corpse has been discovered and everything will spiral out from that. In The Second Cut, we have to read the whole novel to find out whether or not there’s ...

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At Least This I Know

‘All around us, the future feels bright and never-ending.’

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Creative Response – Mrs Death Misses Death

‘I want to feel the benefits of time, to reap the rewards of growing older and reflecting, and to dedicate my time to whatever will help me regard time, not as a chore or something to be endured, but …

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Themes for Great Cities

‘In the thick of it all I hear Jim Kerr’s voice, an open channel between the music and the swirl of moods and emotions it throws up.’

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The Inner Circle

‘Here, have this poem, it is about your courage, your hope, your triumph, the way we see you’

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Love the Sinner

‘Pride is Man. Sweet routine of morning run and night-time gym, exfoliate for perfect skin then beers to rough it up again.’

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Talking History: A Q & A with Joan Haig and Joan Lennon

‘While we cast on and off, she played us famous orations, and sometimes music, on her vinyl record player.’

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Queer Data

‘Queer data is a powerful weapon; in the right hands, it can reshape all of our futures.’

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The People’s City

‘To move through Edinburgh is to see the echoes of the selves I left behind as I moved and grew, each one a faint outline of the emotion held in that place.’

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The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill

‘To do this job you have to be two things that seem at odds with each other; professional and compassionate. Sometimes I’m too much of the second one, and that’s my curse. I do what I do because I car …

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The Sky Beneath the Stone

‘The Sky Beneath the Stone is the immersive and beautifully written first novel from bold new voice in children’s fiction Alex Mullarky.’

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Dragon Storm

‘That evening, tucked into his tiny bunk, he thought again about the face. The bony head, and the teeth, so sharp. And the eyes… He woke in the dark with a start. Then he laughed to himself at his ima …

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Death by Appointment

‘The memories came flooding back with such intensity that she was rendered breathless. Closing her mouth, Dr Cosgrove swallowed twice, her throat occluded completely. How, after all of these years?’

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Tigeropolis – On The Radio!

‘We’ve learnt that it’s more than possible to take a well-loved book series and develop it in new ways.’

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