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This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home for 70 residents and 40 staff highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents between 80 and 100 years of age, including people suffering with dementia. How residents interact with care assistants is emphasised, as are the different behaviours of men and women observed during a year of daily conversations between the author, patients and staff, who share their stories of the pressures of the work. Living Before Dying shows a world where, in extreme old age, people have to learn how to cope with living communally.

Janette Davies is a social and medical anthropologist at the International Gender Studies Centre, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Formerly a nurse/midwife she worked in international development in Bolivia, on the Thai/Cambodian border and Bangladesh. She has since conducted anthropological fieldwork in the UK, Zambia, Tanzania and Georgia.