Overview

What if there were truly a place for everyone? At Hotel Mirabelle, nothing is ordinary... not its guests, not its staff, and certainly not the journeys they take. Charlene has transformed a crumbling seaside hotel into a sanctuary for people with disabilities. When a diverse group of strangers arrive for a week-long holiday-wheelchair users, people with dementia, carers, war veterans, immigrants, the lonely, the heartbroken, the hopeful-their lives begin to intertwine in unexpected and transformative ways. From Brighton's open water to late-night conversations in Bert's Bar, friendships form, prejudices unravel, old wounds surface, and new beginnings glimmer into life. Told with warmth, humour, and extraordinary psychological insight, Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company is a novel about love, loss, dignity, and the courage it takes to keep living fully... no matter your age, your past, or your body. ""Only someone with Valerie Sinason's lived and professional experience could have written a story of disability, ageing, and humanity with such truth, tenderness, and hope."" --Baroness Sheila Hollins

Full Product Details

9781917898034

Table of Contents

Reviews

This is a deeply moving and humane book. Only someone with Valerie's lived and professional experience could have written so truthfully and tenderly about disability, ageing, and what it means to care for and about another person. Valerie captures the heart of love and dependency, commitment, trust, and truth-the realities that come into sharp focus when we live alongside those we love, including in their final years and days. Her writing honours human frailty and courage and our shared need to survive, to belong, and to be held in relationship. These are precious moments, described with great care and compassion -Baroness Sheila Hollins, former President of the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, Former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Former President of the British Medical Association, and current Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry of Learning Disability at St George's, University of London I strongly suspect that had Jane Austen met Sigmund Freud, the two of them might well have given birth to Valerie Sinason, the author of this extraordinarily moving book. Both a writer and a psychoanalyst, Dr. Sinason has drawn upon her multiple talents and her extensive experience, and she has crafted a stunningly heartwarming text about the complexities of being an ageing human being. Every single mortal person will be deeply absorbed by this amazing novel and will have much to learn from Sinason's lifetime wisdom. -Professor Brett Kahr, Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent's University London, Honorary Director of Research at the Freud Museum London.

Author Information

Valerie Sinason is a widely published poet and writer who was on the council of the British Poetry Society and ran Poetry West Hampstead with acclaimed writer Bernard Kops. She was also for four decades (now retired) a consultant child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst focussing on trauma and disability. Her previous novel was The Orpheus Project and her classic renowned textbook is Mental Handicap and the Human Condition: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Intellectual Disability, which included a chapter on working with Alzheimer's. Alzheimers and intellectual disability are also lived family experience for her.

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