Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sarah Collier has started to show the same tell-tale signs of the Alzheimer’s disease as her father: memory loss, even blackouts.

So she is reluctant to accept the invitation to be the guest of honour at a prestigious biotech conference – until her husband Daniel, also a neuroscientist, persuades her that the publicity storm will be worth it. The technology being unveiled at this conference could revolutionise medicine forever. More than that, it could save Sarah’s life.

In Geneva, the couple are feted as stars – at least, Sarah is. But behind the five-star luxury, investors are circling, controversial blogger Terri Landau is all over the story, and Sarah’s symptoms are getting worse. As events begin to spiral out of control, Sarah can’t be sure who to trust – including herself.

My Review

First of all let me just say that the narration was brilliant. Richard Armitage voices Daniel and everything else, while Nicola Walker voices Sarah. It works really well, but then these two are amongst the finest actors of their generation.

I listened to it on Audible. It’s not like someone is simply reading a book, however good they are. This was a performance. And how exciting it was! It was a bit slow to start with, I have to admit, as we had to get to know the characters, but I listened to the last three and a half hours on the plane back from Gran Canaria. I’m glad it got to the end before we landed. I was on the edge of my seat – literally and not just because of the turbulence.

Gosh, what a plot. Sarah has just been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Her father has dementia, and has recently had to move into a care home. Sarah has frighteningly similar symptoms. She suffers memory loss, disorientation, dizziness and sickness. A brain scan has confirmed the worst. She takes tablets to control the issues.

Having won the Nobel prize for her contribution to controlling ebola in Africa, she ‘retires’ to take care of her and Daniel’s daughter Maddie. Daniel is a complex character, at times fully supportive of his brilliant wife, but at times he shows signs of jealousy. She is a celebrity in the world of neuroscience, whereas he is just a humble professor.

Sarah has been asked to endorse Neurocell, a discovery that could revolutionise medicine forever. It’s been developed at the Schiller Institute in Geneva. All top secret – there are ethical implications and huge sums of money involved. Sarah hates the limelight, and now with her diagnosis, she knows she couldn’t cope. But Daniel pushes and pushes until she agrees to go.

What follows is a terrifying journey to hell and back, with Sarah unable to trust anyone, not even herself. And while she is supposedly the ‘victim’ with a terminal diagnosis, she is also strong and inspirational. And the scenes with her father will bring a tear to your eye, even if you have no experience of dementia.

A wonderful debut, I hope we hear a lot more from Richard as an author, as well as an actor.

About the Author

British actor and audio-book narrator.

Richard Armitage was born in 1971, the second son of Margaret, a secretary, and John, an engineer. He grew up in a village outside the city. Some of his favourite childhood stories included The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

At the age of fourteen he transferred from a local state middle school, Brockington College, to Pattison’s Dancing Academy in Coventry (now Pattison College), an independent boarding school specialising in Performing Arts. The school arranged regular theatre visits, and it was here, watching a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, that he discovered an interest in acting: “I remember having that moment of finally understanding what was going on. They were having such a good time and the audience was having such a good time and I just thought that was where I wanted to be. I remember thinking they were doing something they loved and they were getting paid for it”.

Pattison’s introduced him to the demands and obligations of an acting career: “It… instilled me with a discipline that has stood me in good stead – never to be late, to know your lines and to be professional.” It gave its pupils opportunities to appear in local amateur and professional productions, and by the time Richard left school at 17, he had already appeared in Showboat, Half a Sixpence, as Bacchus in Orpheus and the Underworld and in The Hobbit at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham.

After leaving school, Richard joined The Second Generation, a physical theatre group, working for eight weeks in a show called Allow London at the Nachtcircus in Budapest. Here he “threw hoola hoops to a skateboarding Russian and held ladders for a juggling act…did guide roping for the trapeze, and…a weird kind of UV glow-in-the-dark mime illusion thing”. Though he later described “sleeping next to the elephants” as “a low point in show business”, it was sufficient to gain him his Equity card, a prerequisite at the time for entry to the profession.

Returning to the UK, he embarked on a career in musical theatre, working as assistant choreographer to Kenn Oldfield and appearing in the West End and on tour in a series of musicals including 42nd Street, My One and Only, Nine, Mr Wonderful, Annie Get your Gun and Cats.

By 1995, inspired in part by seeing Adrian Noble’s classic 1994 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford, he was laying the foundations of an acting career, appearing at the Actors’ Centre’s Tristram Bates Theatre as Macliesh in Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, and at the Old School Manchester as Henry in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, Flan in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation and Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He was also studying for a Society of British Fight Directors qualification.

This was the year that Richard enrolled on a three-year Acting course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). In his final year at LAMDA, an advert on the college notice board for film extras led to his first experience of acting in a feature film: a one-line role in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It was a humble, though interesting, entry into film: “I felt very nervous saying my line – I had practised it for three weeks… I actually ended up as a computer graphic in the film, I think”. Despite being unidentifiable on screen, he found himself besieged by Star Wars fans when touring Japan with the RSC two years later.

Graduating in the summer of 1998, he immediately joined the cast of Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, having already appeared at the Edinburgh Festival.

And the rest, as they say, is history.