Wordery Books Wellcome Book Prize

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Introducing the shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize, showcasing this year’s best writing on health, medicine, and illness.

Stay With Me
(Paperback)
Ayobami Adebayo
$9.55

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE

NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017

Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. It is all her husband wants, all her mother-in-law wants, and she has tried everything. But when her relatives insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear.

Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of 1980s Nigeria, Stay With Me is a story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the power of grief, and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood. It is a tale about the desperate attempts we make to save ourselves, and those we love, from heartbreak.

The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris

The Butchering Art
(Hardback)
Lindsey Fitzharris
$18.47

DAILY MAIL, GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017

Shortlisted for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize

Winner of the 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing

The story of a visionary British surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world - the safest time to be alive in human history

Victorian operating theatres were known as 'gateways of death', Lindsey Fitzharris reminds us, since half of those who underwent surgery didn't survive the experience. This was an era when a broken leg could lead to amputation, when surgeons often lacked university degrees, and were still known to ransack cemeteries to find cadavers. While the discovery of anaesthesia somewhat lessened the misery for patients, ironically it led to more deaths, as surgeons took greater risks. In squalid, overcrowded hospitals, doctors remained baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high.

At a time when surgery couldn't have been more dangerous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: Joseph Lister, a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon. By making the audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection - and could be treated with antiseptics - he changed the history of medicine forever.

With a novelist's eye for detail, Fitzharris brilliantly conjures up the grisly world of Victorian surgery, revealing how one of Britain's greatest medical minds finally brought centuries of savagery, sawing and gangrene to an end.

With the End in Mind
(Hardback)
Kathryn Mannix
$21.66

In this unprecedented book, palliative medicine pioneer Dr Kathryn Mannix explores the biggest taboo in our society and the only certainty we all share: death.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE

Told through a series of beautifully crafted stories taken from nearly four decades of clinical practice, her book answers the most intimate questions about the process of dying with touching honesty and humanity. She makes a compelling case for the therapeutic power of approaching death not with trepidation but with openness, clarity and understanding.

With the End in Mind is a book for us all: the grieving and bereaved, ill and healthy. Open these pages and you will find stories about people who are like you, and like people you know and love. You will meet Holly, who danced her last day away; Eric, the retired head teacher who, even with Motor Neurone Disease, gets things done; loving, tender-hearted Nelly and Joe, each living a lonely lie to save their beloved from distress; and Sylvie, 19, dying of leukaemia, sewing a cushion for her mum to hug by the fire after she has died.

These are just four of the book's thirty-odd stories of normal humans, dying normal human deaths. They show how the dying embrace living not because they are unusual or brave, but because that's what humans do. By turns touching, tragic, at times funny and always wise, they offer us illumination, models for action, and hope. Read this book and you'll be better prepared for life as well as death.

To Be a Machine
(Paperback)
Mark O'Connell
$9.98

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2018

A stunning new non-fiction voice tackles an urgent question... what next for mankind?

'Troubling and humorous, this is one of my current give-it-to-everyone books - I buy six copies at a time'

Jeanette Winterson

Mayhem
(Hardback)
Sigrid Rausing
$17.15

A Sunday Times Book of the Year 'Riveting, clear-sighted and exceptionally articulate... Her literary and psychoanalytic fluency gives the book an impact that feels arrestingly honest... Heartbreaking' Daily Telegraph 'This is a fierce, lyrical, and lucid memoir that asks agonizing questions about guilt, innocence, and judgment and reminds us how difficult it can be to untangle one from the other' Siri Hustvedt'Powerful, spare [and] striking' Observer 'Unique and haunting' Sunday Times 'What gives this book its astonishing power is not the guilt, but the intelligence and literary skill. Beautifully structured... Rausing sets the scene with painterly delicacy and then steps back to analyse the implications of what she has revealed' Guardian A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a familyIn the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened to her brother and his wife.In Mayhem, she asks the difficult questions those close to the world of addiction must face. 'Who can help the addict, consumed by a shaming hunger, a need beyond control? There is no medicine: the drugs are the medicine. And who can help their families, so implicated in the self-destruction of the addict? Who can help when the very notion of 'help' becomes synonymous with an exercise of power; a familial police state; an end to freedom, in the addict's mind?'

The Vaccine Race
(Paperback)
Meredith Wadman
$15.97

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2018

A GUARDIAN SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017

`Riveting ... invites comparison to Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'

Nature

The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases.

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant. There was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated foetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia produced the first safe, clean cells that made possible the mass-production of vaccines against many common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day effectively wipe out rubella for good.

This vaccine - and others made with those cells - have since protected hundreds of millions of people worldwide, the vast majority of them preschool children. Meredith Wadman's account of this great leap forward in medicine is a fascinating and revelatory read.

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