In her book, Radical Acts of Love, Janie Brown, oncology nurse of thirty years and counsellor of terminally ill patients, recounts twenty conversations she has had with the dying – including people close to her. Each conversation uncovers a different perspective and experience of death, while at the same time exploring its universalities.
‘This is the greatest gift we could give our loved ones: to be prepared and open and accepting when the time comes for us to leave this world’
As well as offering an extremely sensitive and wise insight into our final moments, Janie offers practical ways to facilitate the shift from feeling helpless about death to feeling hopeful; from fear to acceptance; and from feeling disconnected and alone to becoming part of the wider, collective story of our mortality.
Praise for Radical Acts of Love:
‘A book as much about love as it is about death… This is a glorious book that I would not hesitate to give to anyone’
– Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times
‘Insightful, wise and life-affirming, Brown’s book teaches us that sharing someone’s final weeks is perhaps the most radical act of love we can offer’
– Observer
‘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. Unforgettably wise, kind and wonderful’
– Stephen Fry
Janie will be in conversation with Dr Lesel Dawson, a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol who specialises in grief, Renaissance literature and the history of the emotions.
