TAKE ME HOME Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself by Jonathan Taylor, Granta £12.99 pp272

For nearly two decades Taylor’s father suffered from Parkinson’s disease and the progressive dementia that sometimes accompanies it. Taylor’s account of paternal disintegration, and of his own search for the truth about the elusive man his father once was, turns its back on the clichés of the genre to which it seems initially to belong – the doleful memoir of illness and/or familial dysfunction. Instead, there is black comedy to be extracted from the story of a man whose condition persuades him that family members are enemies in disguise intent on kidnapping him and renders him incapable of distinguishing between photographs of his youngest son, Humphrey Bogart and a giraffe. Taylor’s willingness to acknowledge this makes all the more poignant his attempts to reconstruct the father lost beneath the disease and to find the complex and contradictory personality that it destroyed.

THE PRESENCE by Dannie Abse, Hutchinson £15.99 pp278

In June 2005, as the poet Dannie Abse drove along a motorway slip road in south Wales, another car careered into the back of his and sent it crashing off the Tarmac. Abse emerged from the wreck with relatively minor injuries, but his wife, Joan, to whom he had been married for more than 50 years, was killed. The Presence is a selection from the journals he began to write some months after the accident in an attempt to alleviate the worst pains of his sudden and arbitrary bereavement. Moving between the acknowledgment of present loss and the benign sanctuary of the past, where recollections of his life with Joan can provide comfort, Abse’s diary is a remarkable and tender document. As the months and the pages pass, it becomes less an exorcism of his grief and more a celebration of the things that he values in life – art, music, poetry, friendship, humour and, above all, the love he found with his wife.

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