In 2011, at the age of 68, the critic and novelist Jonathan Raban “was transformed into an old man”. What felt vaguely like a hangover was diagnosed a few hours later as a stroke. With the right side of his body paralysed, Raban spent time in intensive care before being transferred to the neurological ward of the Swedish hospital in downtown Seattle (born in Norfolk, he moved to the US in 1990). He left in a wheelchair five weeks later and survived for more than a decade, dying in January this year. During that time he worked on a memoir....