Robert McCrum is the author of six novels, including Mainland, The Fabulous Englishman and Suspicion and co-author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller: The Story of English, on which the Emmy award-winning television series was from 1979 to 1995, while also writing regularly for The Guardian. Now Literary Editor of The Observer, he lives in London, England with his wife, Sarah Lyall and their daughter, Alice. He was one of the founding trustee of different Strokes in 1966 and in 2001 became a patron of the fast growing charity.

On the morning of July 29th July 1995, Robert, forty-two, married only ten weeks, woke to find he could not move; he had suffered a paralyzing stroke. His life changed irrevocably.

Like many of his generation, Robert McCrum never thought he might be struck down unexpectedly. An admired novelist and editorial director of the great English publishing house Faber and Faber, he was also a reporter who had travelled to some of the most dangerous war torn places. Overnight, his world shifted. But with a reporter's sense of adventure and a writers desire to communicate his experience to others, he decided nevertheless to chronicle what became a remarkable new journey "into that mysterious, unexplored territory, the neighbourly world of the unwell". And as he and his wife, Sarah Lyall, struggle towards recovery, "My Year Off", the autobiographical account of his stroke, also becomes an unexpected moving love story - Sarah entering into the telling, contributing her own diary, her excitement when the first toe moved, the heartbreak of depression, the moments of acute agony and pure comedy. His beautifully written, intensely personal account of two peoples' rediscovery of life after a sudden illness is a testament to the courage of the human spirit, a clear-eyed portrayal of the emotional and physical trials that can beset us, and a guiding light for anyone whose life is touched by illness.