What Can I Do to Help?: 75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer's Frontline

Deborah Hutton's discovery that the niggling cough which had been troubling her for a couple of months was actually an aggressive lung cancer marked the beginning of a brand-new learning curve - a personal odyssey that taught her to let go of her super-competent I-can-handle-it-myself persona and gratefully accept the huge amount of help beamed at her by her close-knit family and "world class" network of friends and neighbours. From her own experience and out of her conversations with fellow members of the "Cancer Club" comes this anthology of supremely practical examples of ways in which friends and family, often themselves reeling from the shock of the diagnosis and feeling just as helpless and at a loss to know what to do, can make a real, substantial difference. "What can I do to help?" you ask. Well, stand by, because the answer is "Plenty".

Deborah Huttton was a journalist for 25 years, writing for most of the country's major glossy magazines and newspapers - from Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and the Mail on Sunday's You magazine to The Observer, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. This was her sixth book. She lived in north London with her husband, photographer and director, Charlie Stebbings, and their four children, Archie, Romilly, Clemmie and Freddie.