'Gift, a son's story' by Dan Seagrave - out now!

I'm very pleased to announce the publication of 'Gift, a son's story' by Dan Seagrave. Dan writes as HarryC on ABCTales and is one of our most talented writers.

You can order your copy here (free on Kindle Unlimited)

https://tinyurl.com/4snv2e3n

'In 2016, Dan Seagrave and his family were faced with a decision that faces so many people with elderly relatives. His mother had to go into hospital with a serious illness. While she was in there, it was determined that she could no longer live independently (as she had been) and would need nursing care for the rest of her life. With the available options limited, and either unaffordable or inadequate, Dan took the decision to give up work and move into his mother's home temporarily to be her full-time carer. Her illness was such that she wasn't expected to live for much longer, anyway. But being back in her own home, and surrounded by people she knew and loved, gave her a new lease of life and thirst for living.  This is the story of those last few months that Dan and his mother spent together.'

Here's a review by celticman:

Gift a Son’s Story resonates like Emily Dickinson’s poetry: 

‘That love is all there is,

Is all we know of love…’

 My mum had Alzheimer’s. Dan Seagrave gets that call. Many are chosen, but few choose to become carers, particularly sons. One of the most popular songs at funerals nowadays is Angels by Robbie Williams. Schmaltzy and oversweet. Where mourners’ life stories and popular music meet. Few of us have the ability or write enough about meaningful things that talks to us. Makes us think in the way Seagrave’s does.

Seagrave finished re-writing Gift - 22nd February 2025. He takes the reader back almost ten years to 2016. I read lots of biographies and autobiographies. This week and last, for example, Coal Black Morning, by that guy in Suede, whose music I’ve never listened to and whose name I can’t remember. That worries me, not remembering. Is it forgetfulness of something worse?  Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, speaks for itself.   Dan Seagrave’s book is the best of the bunch.

Sometimes it’s easier to define biographies or autobiographies by what they are not. There’s the then I signed for United, sort. Ghost-written (yes, I’d take the job) dredging up the past and planting gargoyles. Then there’s the frictionless prose. A rambling affair. The writer insists on telling you everything. Reams and reams and reams of nothing. 

Secrets are what readers hope for. What it feels like to be you (and by extension us) like a stepping stone in a stream as event wash over you. More and more of us find ourselves stuck in the place of caring and not caring when mum and dad, sometimes both, can no longer care for themselves. Seagrave takes the reader there. 

   ‘ “Mr Seagrave.  I need to tell you something about your mother.”

I glanced up at the clock.  It was just after midday.  Sunday afternoon - 18th September, 2016.   A date and time I then knew I would always remember.’

Seagrave describes that as ‘Tremor’. The type of fault movement can classify earthquakes and he extends that analogy to structure his narrative after he moves in with and cares for his mum. ‘Pre-shocks,’ ‘Aftershocks,’ ‘Earthquakes,’ ‘Rumblings,’ ‘Movement,’ and the like showing the seismic shock and the disintegration of what until then was, on the surface, normal family life if such a beast exists outside Larkins, This Be Verse. 

A diagnosis of Asperger’s is hardly a shock after 30 years. More a relief. A way of explaining what has happened and continues to happen to those that are inside neurodiversity. 

‘Putting on an act.  Trying to get accepted as a dog, even though I was a cat.  And the world seeing me not as a cat trying my best to be a dog – but as a pretty miserable excuse for a dog!  That was how it had felt for much of my life.’

His mum is his lodestar. His father lost to alcoholism. Their lifetime together is weaved together with his troubled relationship with his elder brother, Russell, and his second wife, Lynn.

Their concern is more with material things and what other folk will think. Dan Seagrave is the antithesis of this. Conflict of what will look best with what Dan knows in his bones is best for him and his mum. Relative poverty is the crime they find him guilty of again and again. Haranguing him like a Daily Mail hate campaign framed as a helping hand frame from afar. Truth speaks to justice about men who smoke and drink and care for their mum but work for the minimum wage and nothing is ever good enough. 

In contrast, Dan’s life with his mum putters on with the cat and home help and diabetic nurse making visits and wee trips in the car, quite contentedly. 

‘That sign I’d bought for mum and hung on her vase of twigs by the TV… it was for her.  But each morning, as I awoke, it was one of the first things I saw.

            Believe in yourself.’

They lived in the past where mum was comfortable talking about the war. Her getting a job with Tote Investors in London, then later as a meter reader for London Electricity Board. Dad leaving the army in 1952 and working as a lorry driver for a forage merchants in Wandsworth, then as a council estate caretaker. Them moving to Kent and later retiring, before it all fell to bits.'

 Rheumatoid arthritis had almost done for her but she was still chipper. But the clock’s ticking.  

Out in the real world they’ve created, Russell and Lynn have their own ideas what’s to be done, when the time comes. Love is all there is. Read on.