Go the Way Your Blood Beats

Read by: Mateo Oxley

Author: Emmett de Monterey

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At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
10:09.14

Published: 6th July 2023

Digital Audiobook

$22.99

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Brought to you by Penguin.

When Emmett de Monterey is eighteen months old, a doctor diagnoses him with cerebral palsy. Words too big for his 25-year-old artist parents and their happy, smiling baby.

Growing up in South East London in the 1980s, Emmett is spat at on the street and prayed over at church. At his school for disabled children, he's told he will be expelled if the rumours are true, if he's gay; at his mainstream school, teachers refuse to schedule his classes on the ground floor, and he loses a stone from the effort of getting up the stairs.

When he is ten years old, Emmett is chosen for a first-of-its-kind surgery in America that will 'cure' him, enable him to walk unaided. BBC cameras follow him to a hospital in Connecticut and newspapers talk of miracles. Despite himself, Emmett hopes for a miracle too: to walk, to dance, to not be nervous in wet weather. To have a body that's everyday beautiful, to hold hands in the street. To not be gay, which he believes is another word for loneliness. But when the 'miracle' doesn't occur, Emmett must reckon with a world which views disabled people as invisible, unworthy of desire. He must fight to be seen.

A beautiful, intensely powerful and heart-breaking memoir, Go The Way Your Blood Beats is a story about seeing ourselves and being seen.