Listen: How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations
KATHRYN MANNIX
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 272 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Doctor Kathryn Mannix has spent her career working with people who have incurable, advanced illnesses. A pioneer of the new discipline of palliative medicine, she distilled all her wisdom and experience into her best-selling book With the End in Mind, which became something of a phenomenon, encouraging its many ­readers to talk about death and dying. Using the same storytelling technique she perfected in her first book, to help us die well, in this book she uses it to help us live better, more responsive lives. It’s a book of stories about the challenges people face; and about how they speak and listen to each other – too often, not very compassionately or intelligently. It’s terrific. One of her stories made me cry, so I’ll go straight to it.

It’s about the state she calls “In-Between-Ness”, the place between knowing and not-knowing, where one first suspects there may be a problem, and then has one’s suspicions confirmed as true. She tells us there are two types of not-knowing. “In one, the person has been told the bad news, and yet sometimes they appear not to know it.” In the other, it is because the diagnosis has either not been reached or has not yet been shared with everyone who has to be in the loop.