Polly Morland

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford PrizeThe Top Ten BestsellerWaterstones Non-Fiction Book of the MonthA Sunday Times Paperback of the Year ‘If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading’ - Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford judgeWhen Polly Morland is clearing out her mother’s house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine – she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own. In A Fortunate Woman, with its beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, Polly Morland has written a profoundly moving love letter to a landscape, a community and, above all, to what it means to be a good doctor.‘Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry’ - Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times‘Timely . . . compelling . . . a delicately drawn miniature’ - Financial Times‘This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape’ - Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman

A moving, evocative account of a rural GP in a remote rural location.

This book is a modern investigation of an ancient virtue, inspired by a group for stage-frightened musicians in 1940s Manhattan. Coinciding with the terrifying height of World War Two, it was called The Society of Timid Souls. Seventy years later, as fear about everything from terrorism to economic meltdown has become part of our daily lives, Polly Morland reconvenes the society, setting out to discover what it means to be brave in an age of anxiety. Her journey-and this book-is full of amazing people and surprising ideas. It explores how and why people are brave, from battlefield to hospital ward, circus tightrope to suburban street, disaster zone to political protest. It throws light on some of the myths and lies that surround our favourite virtue. And most of all, it asks can we learn to be brave?