‘She tasted of mermaids, of the sea,’ says Helen Stevenson after kissing her youngest daughter Clara, whose salty skin is a tell-tale symptom of cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic condition that shortens the life expectancy of those who have it.

In Love Like Salt, (a title that’s taken from a fairytale), motherhood, medicine and music are explored with a spellbinding intensity.

This memoir is beautifully written and entirely emotionally honest – describing exactly what it’s like to live under the shadow of Clara’s illness, with its worries and fears, handfuls of pills and hospital stays, but it’s also a celebration of a family who are still determined to live as luminous a life as possible, to make a kind of poetry out of the everyday.

Love Like Salt by Helen Stevenson is published by Virago, £14.99