Grabbing life with one hand

Just before her tenth birthday Sarah Anderson, an upper-middle-class Catholic living in Knightsbridge, discovered a cancerous lump below her left elbow and was given a few months to live. The doctors recommended amputation.

She was photographed by the future Lord Snowdon so that there would be 'a lasting record of how I had looked', and on the day before her operation she played the part of Mary in her school Nativity. As she raised both arms in prayer for the Magnificat, "it must have struck them all that this was going to be the last time."

Halfway to Venus is a survivor's account of what it is to live with only one arm. Anderson unflinchingly describes the impact of an amputation that may have been unnecessary and her long slow struggle against other people's attitudes, namely their own fear. Having one arm, she writes, was "a visible

secret" that provoked embarrassed stares, stupid questions and awkward euphemisms.

She tells of a friend who insisted on sitting beside her in the theatre in order to "lend" a hand to clap with; of the teacher who worried that if Anderson attempted high-jump she would do irreparable harm were she to fall on her "short arm". Shrinking from terms like 'stump' or 'flipper', Anderson admits to having found no word adequate to describe the small part of her upper arm which remains.

A Benedictine Father tells her: "We define ourselves by what we have lost." She laments that she can't use the plural of hand, cross arms, do a cartwheel. But she also learns there's "nothing I couldn't at least attempt to do on my own".

She travels. She opens, at 13 Blenheim Crescent, the Travel Bookshop, a unique institution of sofas, fresh coffee and the atmosphere of Shakespeare & Co in Paris (which features as Hugh Grant's shop in the romantic comedy Notting Hill). She has lovers, whom she invites back to her apartment above the shop.

Uncoy about sex, Anderson explores