Take Care: A Memoir of Love, Family and Never Giving Up
Lindsey Burrow with Donald McRae
Century, £22, pp320
In 2024, rugby league player Rob Burrow succumbed to pneumonia, having succeeded in not merely surviving but living with spirit and positivity for an odds-defying four and a half years after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Crucial to that was Lindsey, his wife and the mother of their three young children, who provided round-the-clock care while continuing to work as a physiotherapist. Her modest memoir is humbling but also rousing, its title as much a call to action as a valediction, urging us to do more for those who give their all: society’s unpaid carers.
Tilt
Emma Pattee
The Borough Press, £16.99, pp240
At 37 weeks pregnant, Portland native Annie is a sweaty, teary mess but she’s grimly determined not to leave Ikea without a cot. Then the earthquake hits. Swerving from social satire to end-times quest, Pattee’s pacy, immaculately modulated debut novel takes the form of a monologue, delivered by Annie to her unborn child. It spans barely a day yet captures plenty about the compromises and consolations of marriage and midlife, about the gnawing discontent of unfulfilled creative promise and the erasure of self that comes with looming motherhood. As she crawls through the stricken city in search of her husband, Annie’s voice rings out, rueful, tender and increasingly fierce.
Lightborne
Hesse Phillips
Atlantic Books, £9.99, pp448
From its opening scene onwards, debut author Phillips’s fictional portrait of dramatist and spy Christopher “Kit” Marlowe pulses with energy. Harnessing the Elizabethan’s passions and accomplishments, and the enduring mystery of his violent death, the novel weaves a story of love and betrayal, powerfully evoking the peril that came with being both queer and free-thinking. London, meanwhile, is a multisensory backdrop whose theatres and inns teem with threats as well as thrills. Vivid and volatile, it’s historical fiction in which nothing feels foretold and everything is to play for.
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