Peter Caulfield

Coronation Day, 2 June 1953. The Claggs, a humble, working class family from Sheffield, are offered tickets to a once-in-a-lifetime-event - the Queen's coronation. Forsaking their annual seaside holiday for the promise of a prime viewing spot of the procession route and luxurious champagne, the Clagg family take the plunge and buy tickets for the momentous day. But in true Gallico fashion, not everything goes smoothly.

Will their tickets be everything they hoped and dreamed? Will granny stop grumbling that it's all a waste of money? Most importantly, will they ever get to see their beloved Queen? 

'We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time: we defuse an argument with a joke; we swerve to prevent a traffic accident. But sometimes we are unlucky enough to be on the trapdoor when the lever is pulled. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting room of an Oxford neurologist.'

When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst he plummeted into a world of MRI scans a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But like Alice tumbling into Wonderland his fall did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes his fears his loves and losses... and the books that would sustain inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined.

From Kafka to Barbellion this is a literary map of the journey from the kingdom of the well to the land of the sick and forwards into a hopeful future. It's an ode to great writing to storytelling to science and to the power of the imagination. And above all it's a darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain.