A Fortunate Woman

''Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry'' - Sunday Times ''C ontains a profound mesage for the future at a critical moment for general pratcice and us all'' - TLS A Fortunate Woman is a compelling, thoughtful and insightful look at the life and work of a country doctor. Funny, moving and not afraid of the dark, it will speak to readers everywhere. Polly Morland was clearing her late mother''s house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she was astonished to see an old photograph of the remote, wooded valley in which she lives. The book was A Fortunate Man , John Berger''s classic account of a country doctor working in the same valley more than half a century earlier. This chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager. A Fortunate Woman tells her compelling, true story, and how the tale of the old doctor has threaded through her own life in magical ways. Working within a community she loves, she is a rarity in contemporary medicine: a modern doctor who knows her patients inside out, the lives of this ancient, wild place entwined with her own. Revisiting Berger''s story after half a century of seismic change, both in our society and in the ways in which medicine is practised , A Fortunate Woman sheds light on what it means to be a doctor in today''s complex and challenging world. Interweaving the doctor''s story with those of her patients, reflecting on the relationship between landscape and community, and upon the wider role of medicine in society, a unique portrait of a twenty-first century family doctor emerges. Illustrated throughout with photographs by Richard Baker. ''I was consoled and compelled by this book''s steady gaze on healing and caring. The writing is beautiful'' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater and Ghost Wall ''A vibrant and authentic portrait of the rural family doctor in these difficult contemporary times'' - Trisha Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care at the University of Oxford ...

Auteur
Polly Morland is a writer and documentary maker. She worked for fifteen years in television, producing and directing documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery. She is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow in the School of Journalism, Media & Culture at Cardiff University. She is the author of several books including The Society of Timid Souls: Or, How to Be Brave, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book award and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

Texte du rabat

A moving, evocative account of a rural GP in a remote location.

Résumé

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize
The Top Ten Bestseller
Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month
A Sunday Times Paperback of the Year

'If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading' - Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford judge

When Polly Morland is clearing out her mother's house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own.

In A Fortunate Woman, with its beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, Polly Morland has written a profoundly moving love letter to a landscape, a community and, above all, to what it means to be a good doctor.

'Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry' - Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times

'Timely . . . compelling . . . a delicately drawn miniature' - Financial Times

'This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape' - Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman