大象传媒

A memoir with a difference, subtitled: "Seventeen Brushes With Death".

Award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell tells her life through a series of vignettes of her near-death experiences -- including a childhood illness she was not expected to survive; a terrifying encounter on a remote mountain path; a mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.

The book started out as a private project, a way for O'Farrell to help her young daughter who suffers from a serious immunology disorder, including severe eczema and allergies that can cause anaphylactic shock:

"I've asked myself, when she has been very ill, how do you carry on when death is a daily possibility?"

Read by Hattie Morahan

Maggie O'Farrell's novels include "After You'd Gone", "My Lover's Lover", "The Distance Between Us", which won a Somerset Maugham Award, "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox", "The Hand That First Held Mine", which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, "Instructions for the Heatwave", which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award, and "This Must Be The Place".

Abridged and produced by Kirsteen Cameron

First broadcast on 大象传媒 Radio 4 in August 2017.