Touching Distance

Abrams, Rebecca

ISBN 10: 0230015557 / ISBN 13: 9780230015555

Published by Macmillan Pan Macmillan Ltd, London, 2008

About this Item

Signed by the author with a dedication and dated 2009 on the title page. The boards have a small dent in the top edge of the rear panel and little light corner rubbing. Browning to the page edges and the pages are browned but otherwise clean and unmarked. The jacket has some slight edge creasing only. First printing.

Seller Inventory # 017435

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Touching Distance
• Publisher: Macmillan Pan Macmillan Ltd, London
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0230015557
• ISBN 13: 9780230015555
• Binding: Original Cloth
• Edition: First Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

It is 1790. After ten years’ training in the great medical schools of Europe, Alec Gordon has returned to Scotland to take up the post of Physician to the Aberdeen Dispensary. Alec has ambitious plans for modernizing medical practice in the town, starting with the local midwives, whose ignorance and old-fashioned methods appal him.

But Alec’s dreams of progress are thrown into disarray when a mysterious disease suddenly strikes the town, attacking and killing every newly delivered mother for miles around. Alec alone recognizes it as childbed fever, a disease more deadly than the plague, a condition that has baffled the greatest physicians of the age, an illness with no known cause and no known cure.

Desperate to save his patients’ lives, Alec sets out on an astonishing medical quest to conquer the disease. But while Alec struggles to find solutions that lie far in the future, his wife Elizabeth is increasingly lost in the past, prey to terrifying memories of her childhood in Antigua. As she knows and he will learn, some diseases lie beyond the reach of reason.

Based on a true story, Touching Distance is a stunning historical novel that brings to life a fascinating period in world history, exploring the tragic limitations of knowledge and the deep-seated tension between reason and passion in the Age of Enlightenment.

`Beautifully worked. It is a book about the shockingly intimate, but it has an epic feel.’ Hilary Mantel

About the Author

Rebecca Abrams is the author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her non-fiction titles include When Parents Die, a classic in its field, and Three Shoes, One Sock and No Hairbrush, the best-selling guide to having a second child. Her novel, Touching Distance, was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize and won the Medical Journalists' Association Open Book Award (2009).

An award-winning journalist, Rebecca is a former columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a long-standing reviewer for the Guardian. Born in 1963, she has lived in America and Switzerland and now lives in Oxford with her husband and two children.