Bøger af Peter Kennedy

Michael Fitzpatrick is a highly successful prosecuting barrister who is greatly respected and feared in equal measure by many people in the legal profession. When he suddenly announces his premature retirement at the height of his powers, many of his legal colleagues are very surprised. In reality, he wants to enjoy life more with his beloved wife, Carol, who has recently developed progressive dementia. Soon after relocating from London to the Suffolk countryside, Carol contracts ovarian cancer which kills her in just a few months. Utterly devastated with grief at her loss, Michael lives alone in their expensive, elegant house, helped greatly by his devoted daughter, Jean (and to a lesser extent by his not so sympathetic son-in-in law, James). But Michael soon shows all the signs of pre-senile dementia, and a consultant neurologist diagnoses Alzheimer's disease. Michael gets lost and confused on several occasions, and eventually he is persuaded by his loving daughter to move into a care home especially designed for relatively 'young' people such as himself. But two years later, the coronavirus pandemic arrives and literally destroys the usual routine of the home. He becomes even more depressed and greatly misses the regular close contact with Jean and his two young grandchildren. But soon matters come to a head, following which Jean and James finally realise the true nature of his illness.

Dr Roger Cosgrove is a middle aged academic who is grieving intensely over the death of his wife Caroline even more than a year after her death from cancer. Depressed and disillusioned with life generally, he quits his University position prematurely as an IT expert, sells his house in Edinburgh, and relocates to a small cottage in the beautiful Dorset coast where he decides to live a solitary life. But his repetitive routine is suddenly disrupted when his younger son Adrian sends him a mysterious package which contains a combined home video recording of five separate film reels of his young family taken by Roger's father in the 1960s. While the images of himself as a boy and youth, and those of his family, including of his dead sister Margaret, fill Roger with nostalgic memories, there are some disturbing features about the films which come to light particularly when he dreams about them every night. He is constantly told to be careful and that he is in some kind of imminent danger. But credible answers to these riddles only come to light over twenty years later when Adrian is sorting out his father's possession soon after Roger's death. Both Adrian and his father need to decide whether seeing what appears to be definitely true is tantamount to reality, or whether natural common sense always trumps what is logically impossible.

In 2017 Dr Rupert Aston is a clever and conscientious hospital consultant who has been asked by a colleague to sort out the illness of a particularly difficult patient. While he tries hard to get to the bottom of the clinical problem, he is bequeathed a suitcase by his late father containing a mysterious personal journal written by a distant medical ancestor called Dr William Aston, a prominent London physician practising in 1768. His ancestor also describes an intriguing patient whose case baffles all the medical doctors looking after him. As he reads the journal Rupert becomes increasingly aware of the strange similarities between the two cases despite the appallingly stark contrast in medical practice and attitudes between the two time periods. The narrative alternates between subsequent events in contemporary London and Georgian London until Rupert eventually reaches a credible diagnosis with the aid of one of his colleagues. While his patient is slowly improving with modern treatment, Rupert is made aware of an extraordinary sequence of events that shakes him to the core. He has to decide for himself whether all that has happened is mere coincidence or whether everything that his rational mind has thought to be real has just been an illusion.

Arcadian Memories and other Poems by Peter Kennedy consists of 44 poems on a diverse range of subjects, some of them drawn from the author's personal experience as a medical doctor of the suffering and fears of patients undergoing illness and hospital treatment. A general theme of the collection is an exploration of the interface between the darker aspects of human nature and the process of everyday living. This is predicated on the author's belief that our true underlying natures can sometimes be revealed more clearly when viewed from this aspect.Peter Kennedy CBE, MD, PhD, DSc is a distinguished clinician and scientist who held the Burton Chair of Neurology for 29 years (1987-2016) at the University of Glasgow where he remains active in research and teaching as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation. He also has two Masters degrees in Philosophy, and has written five novels, an award winning popular science book on African Sleeping sickness, and co-edited two textbooks on neurological infections. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences. This is his first book of poetry.

Richard McQuade QC is a recently retired Judge with a major psychological problem. Once a highly esteemed senior officer of Britain's judiciary, he finds himself unable to cope with the inevitable lack of status and responsibility that he now encounters. He becomes so alienated from the world that he considers taking his own life as a real possibility to stop his mental suffering. He therefore devises an eccentric plan to challenge himself with a different experience every month for an entire year in the hope that this will stimulate him into a state of normality. He meets with mixed success in this morbid endeavour, which both exploits his memory of his past life and exposes him to a wide range of powerful experiences. But events take an unusual and ironic turn at the end of his unusual experiment and challenge the entire basis of everything he wishes for with such conviction.

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The animal form of the disease severely limits livestock production and farming, and in people the toxic effects of the treatment for the brain disease can be as painful and dangerous as the disease itself.