Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in People with Disabilities

Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for their bookselling apprenticeship, a decision which has bedevilled him ever since. He'd intended to stay for a year before launching into some less dusty, better remunerated career. Unfortunately for him, the alluring smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap proved irresistible. Soon he was balancing stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows with and trying not to upset the store's resident ghost.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORKER THE WASHINGTON POST THE ATLANTIC NPR PUBLISHERS WEEKLY LITHUB "Fascinating...The great strength of this memoir is its voracious, humble curiosity." - The Atlantic, The 10 Best Books of...

When Emmett de Monterey is eighteen months old, a doctor diagnoses him with cerebral palsy. Words too big for his 25-year-old artist parents and their happy, smiling baby. Growing up in South East London in the 1980s, Emmett is spat at on the street and prayed over at church. At his school for disabled children, he's told he will be expelled if the rumours are true, if he's gay; at his mainstream school, teachers refuse to schedule his classes on the ground floor, and he loses a stone from the effort of getting up the stairs.

"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.

Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear. His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of.

If you grow up in a world where wrinkles are practically illegal, going bald is cause for a mental breakdown, and women over size zero are encouraged to shoot themselves (immediately), what the hell do you do if you're, gasp... disabled? Whatever body you’re born into, the pressure to be normal is everywhere. But have you ever met a normal person? What do they look like? Where do they live? What do they eat for breakfast? And what the **** does normal mean anyway?

With style and straight talk, musician and changemaker Lachi flips disability and neurodivergence into an empowering identity, a cultural movement, and an innovation engine What if the most taboo parts of our identity—the parts we’re taught to mask—are exactly the ones that hold our...