A book recomendation for caregivers. The Caregiver’s Bookshelf: A ‘Keeper’

Andrea Gillies’s memoir, “Keeper,” published in Britain last year, arrives here trailing awards and awed reviews, and I can see why. Though I wasn’t looking forward to still another account of life with deepening dementia, I read this one in a day.

Mrs. Gillies’s saga, subtitled “One House, Three Generations and a Journey into Alzheimer’s,” unfolds on a blustery peninsula in northern Scotland, where she and her husband, their three children and his ailing parents have all moved into a drafty Victorian house miles from anywhere. Mrs. Gillies’s father-in-law can barely walk; her mother-in-law, Nancy, is already paranoid and obstreperous. As the author, a journalist, lays out her plan to restore the overgrown garden and take lovely walks by the sea while working at home, caring for old and young and running a bed and breakfast, I could feel my anxiety rising. How, exactly, was one mortal supposed to manage all that?

As readers here have reason to suspect, unhappy surprises lie ahead. But I kept reading because Mrs. Gillies is such a gorgeous writer, because Nancy is so compelling in her ferocity, and because their relationship — part dance, part duel — is hard to look away from.

And because Mrs. Gillies is uncompromising in her honesty. You will not find her going on about how tending to an increasingly demanding and aggressive woman has gladdened her days, or how God never gives us more than we can handle. You will find passages like this, when Nancy is getting increasingly impossible to help and Mrs. Gillies is awakening on dark mornings with a sense of desperation: