This book has been a great listening experience. Thanks to the author and the publisher for bringing this book to life.

As a gay man who is not HIV positive I found this book to be very sobering. I've never been blasé about HIV, but I don't think I fully understood the impact that it still has on people to contract it today. It's not just about being ill and dying, it's about the discrimination that people face.

I found the writing to be very matter of fact, which I appreciate and in some ways made it more hard hitting. The narration was also excellent.

Roland Chesters recounts his life and the lives of many others in this memoir about being a person who has been diagnosed and is living with HIV/AIDS. The author captures what it looks like when your world is absolutely turned upside down by those three letters, and how we can all do better as a society to learn and educate others on this topic.

The writing of this book felt very conversation-like and I think this added to the casualness of how we should approach HIV/AIDS. Many of the people who spoke about their diagnosis were open about how they had never thought it could have been them with HIV/AIDS and how they believed it was a death sentence. But after receiving more information about managing and living with it, it just became a task to do throughout their day. I think these stories are so important because they educate and give us information to break the stigma.

I enjoyed this book so much, and I think it is an important book for everyone to read. It's very real and there are moments where you will find yourself laughing, crying, and cheering.

Insightful and distressing, Roland Chesters recounts the careful day-by-day recovery from a bleak HIV diagnosis. Together with his partner, Richard, he overcomes the hardships of this insidious disease. He wrestles with feelings of guilt and anger and highlights the stigma and misinformation clouding HIV/AIDS. Originally given weeks to live, the autobiographical insights provided serve as a reminder to cherish what matters most in life (the people we love, the time we have to enjoy, our health, etc.).

This book is informative and will be so helpful to people even like me who have never spent time with anyone with an HIV or AIDS diagnosis.
I found this book fascinating. Roland's whole story and how he has dealt with it, medication he had to take and all these side effects which give you more illness!! His relationships, who he told, who he didn't and why was really sad but understandable.
Roland has written this book in a sensitive but positive thinking way. His story is so sad, funny and empowering. He's taken his illness and said this doesn't define me. I'm Roland not an HIV patient.
The sad thing is, it's still hidden and not spoken about a lot. Attitude towards this illness hasn't really changed much but Roland has picked himself up and thrown himself into being a advocate for his illness, a helper, an advisor. What a man!! I'm in awe of him!!
Thanks to Netgalley for the free arc book for an honest review.
#Netgalley, #ripplesfromtheedge, #silverwoodbooks

This is such an important book! I was lucky enough to get a audiobook copy through NetGalley and I'm really glad that this book exists. This is not just a memoir but also filled with testimonials about living with HIV. The author, Roland, was told he had HIV and only two weeks to live. The first part of this book focuses on his experience and was personally the most engaging part of this book. I find it extremely difficult to rate and review nonfiction memoirs because I don't ever want to be hypercritical of someone's lived experience. It also feels extremely uncomfortable to say that I enjoyed this book but I do think that it is extremely informative and a necessary read for everyone.

My one kind of qualm about it is that it is heavily focused on cisgender gay men. There are a couple testimonials from women, but the vast majority of this book and the testimonials focus on how HIV affects gay men. I would have loved to see a little bit more representation and a little bit more open-minded discussions but as a whole I would recommend this one.

This audiobook brings together not only Roland's story of his diagnosis, the impact it had on him and those around him, but also the stories of 13 other people diagnosed with HIV (and in some cases AIDS) in the UK between 1981 and 2015.

These are tales of survival, of courage, of hope, of love, of resilience.

HIV no longer hits the headline news but it has not gone away. The narration has good pace and flow,and the narrators voices seemed right for the storytelling and the people they were portraying.