Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingPatient 1
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
Charlotte Raven had never heard of Huntington's Disease when, in her mid-thirties, she discovered that her father was suffering from the illness. Life for her and her young family would never be the same again.
Patient 1 is her brutally candid account of coming to terms with this inherited neurodegenerative disease, which can manifest at any time in life for people who carry the faulty gene. As the illness began to take hold of Raven's body, mind and memory, she began to write. She wrote like her life depended on it - and in many ways she believed it did. Frank and fearless, Patient 1 is an act of self-preservation and a kind of reckoning: with the illness, with the person she once was, with the person she is now.
In an afterword, Raven's doctor Ed Wild - one of the country's leading experts in Huntington's - explains how doctors and patients like Charlotte are working together in the hope of one day eliminating this disease altogether.
Honest, intelligent and unsentimental, Patient 1 is a startling self-portrait written with wit and vulnerability, and a unique testament to the power of hope in the face of illness.
© Charlotte Raven 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Charlotte Raven was a journalist in the 1990s and her columns and articles have appeared frequently in the Guardian and New Statesman. She was a contributor to the Modern Review, and editor of the relaunched version in 1997. She lives in London.
Professor Edward Wild is Professor of Neurology at University College London, a Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London's Queen Square, and Associate Director of UCL Huntington's Disease Centre.