麻豆约拍

A memoir with a difference, subtitled: "Seventeen Brushes With Death", in which the award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell tells her life through a series of vignettes of her near-death experiences -- including a childhood illness she was not expected to survive; a terrifying encounter on a remote mountain path; a mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.

The book started out as a private project, a way for O'Farrell to help her young daughter who suffers from a serious immunology disorder, including severe eczema and allergies that can cause anaphylactic shock: "I've asked myself, when she has been very ill, how do you carry on when death is a daily possibility?"

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of nine novels - most recently, the prize-winning, best-selling novel Hamnet about Shakespeare's family and, out in 2022, The Marriage Portrait.

Omnibus of five parts read by Hattie Morahan.

Abridged and produced by Kirsteen Cameron

First broadcast on 麻豆约拍 Radio 4 in August 2017.