‘Maybe Stephen’s greatest. His writing is infused with strange staccato jumps then river-strong flow, with hawk-eyed storytelling leading us on. There’s dread judgement but also religious wonder, and never, once, does the book lose its mesmeric hold.

‘This is not a domestic document. If you seek the unexpected, seek this.’

‘A rare, real-time chronicle of receiving and reckoning with a neurodegenerative diagnosis, Trembling, Still is a study in how to remain awake, accountable and alive while the ground shifts. This book steadies us in this life, reminding us to tend without turning away.’

‘Even in its printed form, Trembling, Still bears the trace of an unsteady hand – raw, intimate, and unprotected. It invites the reader into the friction of receiving devastating news in the middle of an ordinary day, where life continues even as everything has changed, and charges even the simplest tasks with a great longing.

It is a sober reminder that the ride does not go on forever – and a rare, unsentimental guide to what might matter while it still does. What emerges for me is a hard but generous question: how are we using the days when we still can?’

Trembling, Still is jazz-writing at its most turbulently brilliant; tuneful and mournful, poignant and funny, heart-rending and mind-grabbing, skillfully improvisational, eloquent and compelling. Thank you, Stephen Jenkinson: only you could have written this, and I offer you my gratitude, paltry recompense for such a masterful gift to us all.

In Trembling, Still, Stephen Jenkinson writes from the raw edge of a diagnosis with honesty and vulnerability. 

The book is a meditation on grief, dignity, and the fragile brilliance of being alive. For those willing to sit with uncertainty, sorrow, and the strange clarity that arises when the ground shifts beneath us, Trembling, Still serves as a profound companion through bewildering terrain. 

What emerges is not despair, but a fierce reckoning with what it means to live fully, even in the face of uncertainty.

As an oncologist, I have spent decades sitting with people who have just received the kind of news that rearranges the furniture of a life. What I observed is that the hardest part of a serious diagnosis is rarely the physical. It is the collapse of the story a person had been telling themselves about the future. It is the sudden, dizzying encounter with finitude that most of us, living in a culture that prefers to look away, are entirely unprepared for.

There is extraordinary courage in this book, and extraordinary honesty. Jenkinson does not arrive at peace. He arrives at something harder and more trustworthy – a kind of sorrowing clarity that, as he writes, can fit you out for joy. In a culture of bypass, this is a direct, head-on wrestling with that reality.

For anyone who works with the dying, loves someone who is ill, or simply has not yet figured out how to think about their own mortality Trembling, Still is essential reading.

Some years ago, newly grief-stricken, I sat immersed in the “blessing-laced encounter” of a Night of Grief and Mystery and knew myself to be in the presence of folk well-versed in the hard work of grappling with the immovable. Few there are who go willingly into the dark places where demons dwell and come back with such tender, heart-opening renderings of what they have encountered there. Trembling, Still is just such a text and testimonial.

Vulnerability is all too often dissonant in a culture obsessed with competence. Genuine devastation, as Stephen attests, brings with it a deep draught of frailty, it invites hard questions about consistency, and it forces a fumbling acceptance of the inadequacy of much of our bodily being.

Trembling, Still is an honouring of the beauty and brittleness of pottery, the resistance of beans, the affordances of having a hand in the provisioning of our daily bread, and it is an invitation and invocation to cultivate joy and gratitude in the midst of troubling times.