Linda Gillard is a writer’s writer: successful, intensely creative, humble and one of independent publishing’s finest novelists. Her story will inspire you to live each day with your arms opened wide:

I’d like to tell you a story.

In 2012, a few weeks before my 60th birthday, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I went from diagnosis to mastectomy in less than 3 weeks, then underwent a programme of chemo that was so painful and made me so ill, I thought I was dying. Then I had weeks of radiother...