The Smallest Things

It is easy to take for granted the things that are always around us, the people who are always there. And yet they often hold the keys to who we really are. Nick Duerden's grandparents were always just . . . there. A mysterious yet unchanging presence, a source of dutiful visits, birthday cards and carefully preserved rituals: lunches, dinners and endless card games. But, as he enters midlife, and his 98-year-old grandmother enters a care home, he realises that, like so many of us, he should perhaps have paid more attention to her true worth years before. As Nick goes in search of the secrets his late mother took to the grave, he finds it can be the smallest things that keep us together when so much is left unspoken. This is a memoir of the tiny dramas that fill all our lives, and a celebration of the special ties that can bind two intimately connected strangers. Tender and poignant, it captures the richness, and also the complexity, of family life.

Nick Duerden is a freelance journalist whose work appears regularly in a wide selection of newspapers and magazines in the UK and US, including the Guardian, Independent, Sunday Times, GQ, Esquire, Billboard and Elle. He is the author of several books including A Life Less Lonely: What We Can All Do to Lead More Connected, Kinder Lives, Get Well Soon: Adventures in Alternative Healthcare and The Reluctant Fathers' Club: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Cautiously Embrace Parenthood, which have been featured in the Sunday Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Times and Daily Mail, and on Sky News and on BBC Radio 4 and 5. He lives in London, is married, and has two daughters.