Carers Week is an annual campaign to raise awareness of caring, highlight the challenges unpaid carers face and recognise the contribution they make to families and communities throughout the UK. It also helps people who don't think of themselves as having caring responsibilities to identify as carers and access much-needed support. This year Carers Week will take place from 5-11th June 2023.

The campaign is brought to life by thousands of individuals and organisations who come together to provide support for carers, run activities, highlight the vital role carers play in our communities and draw attention to just how important caring is.

A carer is someone who provides unpaid care and support to a family member or friend who has a disability, illness, mental health condition, addiction, or who needs extra help as they grow older. It isn’t someone who volunteers or is employed to provide support.

Here, to support caregivers we have created a collection of books to support on their journey as a carer. We hope that they bring you comfort and hope in challenging times.

In her deeply touching and inspiring work of non-fiction An Extra Pair of Hands, Kate Mosse draws from her own experience of caring for older relatives and discusses the realities and rewards of being a carer. 

Dear Life is a vibrant, tender and deeply personal memoir that finds light and love in the darkest of places. As a specialist in palliative medicine, Dr Rachel Clarke chooses to inhabit a place many people would find too tragic to contemplate. Her training was put to the test in 2017 when her beloved GP father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She learned that nothing - even the best palliative care - can sugar-coat the pain of losing someone you love.

Love & Care by Shaun Deeney ia an eye-opening – and at times jaw-dropping – account of a son’s care for his mother with Parkinson’s dementia that will make you weep with its tenderness and compassion.

Tender by Penny Wincer is an incredible book. A hugely important book that captures the powerful capacity of people to care for others, and all the heartbreaking and heartwarming complexity that this involves. It’s estimated there are some 800,000 child carers in the UK. Penny Wincer’s wise and generous memoir details both her early experiences of caring for her mother then, in later life, as a single parent to her autistic son. Uplifting and honest, it’s about resilience and learning to look after oneself so as to be better able to care for others. 

Somebody I Used to Know is written by Wendy Mitchell who spent twenty years as a non-clinical team leader in the NHS before being diagnosed with Young Onset Dementia in July 2014 at the age of fifty-eight. Shocked by the lack of awareness about the disease, both in the community and in hospitals, she vowed to spend her time raising awareness about dementia. 

This memoir is a brave, compelling and poignant account of living life with dementia. By sharing her story Wendy challenges assumptions and ignorance about dementia. Read this amazing book, it is a gift to all who have been diagnosed with dementia, and their loved ones.

The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills is a brave and highly original memoir about love, family and mental illness, Mills maps her experiences of caring for her father with schizophrenia and reflects on the stories of two other carers from history – F. Scott Fitzgerald and Leonard Woolf.

For lighthearted relief do check out The Reluctant Carer. Irresistibly funny, unflinching and deeply moving, this is a love letter to family and friends, to carers and to anyone who has ever packed a small bag intent on staying for just a few days. This is a true story of what it really means to be a carer, and of the ties that bind even tighter when you least expect it. This is The Reluctant Carer.

Recommended by carers, The Selfish Pig's Guide to Caring includes how to cope with the emotional and practical aspects of looking after someone. 

It acknowledges that as carers, you are prone to loneliness and burnout and yet there is no 'formal training' to get this right. 

Hugh Marriott aims to bring into the open everything he wishes he'd been told when he first became a carer and paints a picture for those who don't know what being a carer feels like. 

If fiction is more your thing, we have selected a couple of titles where caring is central to the story. Deborah Moggach's The Carer is clever, sharp, and yet wonderfully poignant. After hiring highly recommended carer Mandy for their father James, Phoebe and her brother Robert begin to wonder if all is as rosy as they first thought. It would also be remiss of us to not mention The Weight of a Thousand Feathers: Heart wrenching, honest, funny and bold, this exceptional novel about the life, loves and agonies of a young carer, and the love between a mum and her sons, is a storytelling triumph. 

And of course,  do check out our feel-good fiction category. Plenty of reading material here to while away the hours and dive into an alternate world for a bit of light relief.

If you have a recommendation that you'd like to share, do let us know.