{"title":"Lu Spinney","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"beyond-the-high-blue-air-book-lu-spinney-9781782398875","title":"Beyond the High Blue Air","description":"Aged just 29, gifted, athletic and loved, Lu Spinney's son Miles was on the brink of a brilliant future. Then a snowboarding accident changed everything. He suffered a devastating head injury and was left in a coma.  With unflinching honesty, Lu has written a passionate, urgent account of the years following Miles's accident, revealing his existence imprisoned in a limbo of fluctuating consciousness, at times agonizingly aware of his predicament. Beyond the High Blue Air explores the nature of self when all means of communication are lost, the anguish of witnessing Miles's suffering and the slow-dawning recognition by his family that, though Miles had been prevented from dying, he had not been brought back to a meaningful life. Beyond the High Blue Air is a bold, raw, courageous memoir: a testament to the fierce power of maternal love.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572701536529,"sku":"GOR007457733","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50468037787921,"sku":"CIN1782398872G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53245843505425,"sku":"GOR009232720","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1782398872.jpg?v=1758968013"},{"product_id":"beyond-the-high-blue-air-book-lu-spinney-9781782398899","title":"Beyond the High Blue Air","description":"Aged 29, Lu Spinney's son Miles suffered a devastating head injury and was left in a coma. With unflinching honesty, Lu Spinney has written a passionate, urgent account of the years following her son Miles's accident, revealing his existence imprisoned in a limbo of fluctuating consciousness, at times agonizingly aware of his predicament.   With unfailing honesty and courageous prose, Lu Spinney's memoir explores the very nature of self and the anguish of witnessing Miles's suffering as she and her family come to realise that, although he has been saved from death, he has not been brought back to a meaningful life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49648388407569,"sku":"GOR010805440","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49680986865937,"sku":"GOR008171328","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49683232981265,"sku":"GOR008431074","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1782398899.jpg?v=1751184471"},{"product_id":"beyond-the-high-blue-air-book-lu-spinney-9781936787548","title":"Beyond the High Blue Air","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLike \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e by Joan Didion, \u003ci\u003eBeyond the High Blue Air\u003c\/i\u003e is a spare, sharp memoir about the speed with which a comfortable existence can be blighted by grief. --Bee Wilson, \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLu Spinney's memoir \u003ci\u003eBeyond the High Blue Air\u003c\/i\u003e is at once a portrait of the fearlessness of familial love and the profound dilemma posed by modern medicine. When Spinney's twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp, writes his mother, skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead . . . He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThus begins the erratic loss-- Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness--that unravels over the next five years. Spinney, her husband, and three other children put their lives on hold to tend to Miles at various hospitals and finally in a care home. They hold out hope that he will be returned to them. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family's intimate experience.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e And yet, as personal a book as this is, it offers universal meaning, presenting an eloquent and piercing description of what it feels to witness an intimate become unfamiliar. This is a story about ambiguous loss: the disappearance of someone who is still there. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney's story takes a turn. The family and, to the degree that he can communicate, Miles himself come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. Spinney, cutting her last thread of hope, wishes for her son to die. And yet, even as she allows this difficult revelation to settle, she learns that this is not her decision to make. Because Miles is diagnosed as being in a minimally conscious state rather than a persistent vegetative state, there is no legal way to bring about his death, a bewildering paradox that Spinney navigates with compassion and wisdom. This profound book encompasses the lyrical revelations of a memoir like Jean-Dominique Bauby's \u003ci\u003eThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly\u003c\/i\u003e as well as the crucial medical and moral insights of a book such as Atul Gawande's \u003ci\u003eBeing Mortal.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50249954590993,"sku":"CIN1936787547G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51424282575121,"sku":"CIN1936787547VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1936787547.jpg?v=1751219725"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/author-books-by-lu-spinney.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}