Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Head Above Water : Reflections on Illness, Paperback / softback Book

Head Above Water : Reflections on Illness Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Description

Head Above Water is a professor's moving account of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at just eighteen in a conservative Kuwaiti society, drawing from her diary entries and fading memories as the disease advances. “Shahd Alshammari’s sensuous prose explores the manipulation of memory, the question of time, and gender politics.

We are invited to reconsider the intricacies of love, the body, motherhood, the pervasive power of language, the power of women’s education, and the synergy between the Professor and the student.”—Jokha Alharthi Omani author of Celestial bodies, winner of the International Man Booker Prize (2019)“Reading Alshammari’s work, I thought continually of Yeats’s famous line, “a terrible beauty is born.” In this book, illness is that terrible beauty, always affecting but never determining the author’s life.”—Arthur W.

Frank, Ph.D. Author of At the Will of the Body and The Wounded Storyteller“An important piece of life writing - Shahd Alshammari’s memoir breaks new ground in representing the lives of disabled Arab women.

Exploring connections between the body, language, and culture, Alshammari’s new memoir is a sensitive and moving invitation to reconsider the stories that we are made of.” —Dr. Roxanne Douglas, University of Warwick“A necessary and beautiful account of life with a sometimes-invisible and unpredictable disability, complicated by both patriarchy and racism, as well as a professor’s love letter to the act of teaching and being taught.”—Marcia Lynx Qualey (@Arablit)

Other Formats

Save 8%

£10.99

£10.05

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops