RADICAL ACTS OF LOVE: how we find hope at the end of life
Janie Brown
RIGHTS AVAILABLE: TV/Film and all other rights controlled by the bks Agency
RIGHTS SOLD: Canongate (World rights); Penguin Random House (Canada); Dutch/Mulenhoff Boekerij, Chinese Simplified Characters/Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House
RADICAL ACTS OF LOVE offers an insightful, informative, and reassuring road-map through one of the most important but least-discussed experiences of our lives. Preparing well for death is an act of love for ourselves and for those close to us.
The twenty intimate stories in this book provide hope and comfort for people with advanced cancer, as well as for their families. Death through illness can be viewed as a natural and inevitable facet of life that can be met with curiosity and courage, rather than with aversion and fear. RADICAL ACTS OF LOVE offers practical ways to facilitate the shift from feeling hopeless to hopeful; from being afraid of death to accepting it; from having an unresolved past to being at peace with the life that’s been lived; from feeling disconnected and alone, to feeling part of the collective story; and from dying, to living until we die.
RADICAL ACTS OF LOVE is a balm for the fearful heart and a tonic for the spirit. It offers solace to anyone engaged in living at the edge of death.
“With Radical Acts of Love, Janie Brown demonstrates the power of a book to transform, in fact to turn things upside down. She turns death into life, despair into hope, sorrow into joy, and pain into love with these twenty astonishing encounters with the dying. We all know somewhere in the back of our minds that a deeper understanding and acceptance of death is supposed to release us into an even fiercer embrace of life—this wonderful book made me, for the first time, truly feel and believe it.”
Janie Brown was born in Scotland and educated with a Masters in Psychology at St. Andrews University, and a Masters in Nursing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She has worked for more than thirty years as an oncology nurse and counsellor, and in 1995 founded the Callanish Society, a grassroots non-profit organization for people living with, and dying from, cancer, based in Vancouver (www.callanish.org). She presents nationally and internationally, has published in professional journals, and writes a widely-read blog www.lifeindeath.org. In 2016, Janie received a Lloyd Symington Foundation grant to write this book.
UK edition (Canongate Books)
“This is a glorious book that I would not hesitate to give to anyone facing an unwelcome diagnosis or prognosis of their own or of a loved one. It is kind and practical. I learnt so much and feel glad that it exists and convinced that many people will be helped by Brown’s generous sharing of more than 30 years’ experience of working with the dying.”