Can our personalities be taken away from us? Are memory & identity mutually dependent? What exactly is the soul? Three years ago Andrea Gillies a writer & mother of three took on the care of her mother-in-law Nancy who was in the middle stages of Alzheimers disease. This newly extended family moved to a big Victorian house on a headland in the far far north of Scotland where the author failed to write a novel & Nancy her disease accelerated by change began to move out of the rational world & into dementias alternative reality. This book is a journal of life in this wild location in which Gillies tracks Nancys unravelling grasp on everything that we think of as ordinary & interleaves her own brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimers works. For the family at the centre of this drama the learning curve was steeper & more interesting than anyone could have imagined.