The subjects of care homes and of dementia have been in the news a lot recently, but they are now being taken up by other areas of the media...
In Michael Caine's new film, "Is Anybody There?", he plays a resident in a care home who befriends the manager's young son. It opens in the UK on the 1st May 2009.
Becca Stevenson, whose dad John has Alzheimer's, is starring in a play about dementia called "For Once I Was" at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, London. The play centres on the the experience of younger people with dementia and runs until May 2nd 2009.
Samantha Harvey's debut novel, The Wilderness, has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. The Wilderness focuses on Jake, a man in his 60s with Alzheimer's, desperately trying to hold on to his identity.
Samantha's website describes the book as follows: 
Jake Jameson is a sixty-five-year-old architect who is on the cusp of retirement. One evening he’s sitting alone in the office, staring down at an architectural drawing. He can’t quite figure out what he’s supposed to do with it. Suddenly he remembers a word, one for which he has been trying for days to recall; entropy - for him the single most interesting theory that exists, a theory that says everything loses, rather than gains, order.
This idea underlies this riveting tale of a man whose memories are slowly eroding. As Alzheimer’s begins to wear away his sense of identity, Jake builds stories around his life that inform his feelings of blame and responsibility - only to have the stories disintegrate faster than he can capture them. As the plot keeps shifting and the facts unravel, little mysteries start to form: What was the problem with the missing letter “e”? What was behind the mythologies that his Jewish mother told him as a child? Where is his daughter Alice? What happened to her? Eventually we realise that even Jake’s clearest memories may not be true. He is the flawed witness to his own past, the ultimate unreliable narrator. Yet in the end we are left with a clear and moving portrait not only of a sympathetic man but also of a heartrending disease as seen from the inside out.
I've just started reading it, but if there are any readers out there who have finished it, why not e-mail info@yourcarehome.co.uk with a review?
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