Apology for Absence

Julia Darling's first book, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, grew from her experiences of being treated for breast cancer; "[it] helped me to step out of the difficult present and to use my imagination to be somewhere else." Her second collection looks at the world beyond the hospital, though still from the viewpoint of a cancer patient in the advanced stages of the illness. The themes are familiar, but here she writes with a wider perspective, a deeper understanding which reach out to the heart of the human condition and the greater mysteries of life, albeit in an understated way. This is a powerful and deeply affecting book, completely unsentimental yet charged with emotion - indeed, one of those rare books that have a profound and lasting effect.