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The first-ever comprehensive guide to help and empower elderly people and their loved ones. This invaluable book, running to over 600 pages, explains all the different ways in which elderly people can help themselves and how their relatives and friends can make life easier for them. It exposes the workings of the care world and highlights the deficiencies of the system. Using her personal experience as a consumer of the system, the author interweaves her own knowledge with systematic analysis as well as interviews with other consumers and people working at all levels in the later life sector.

The book's guidance and suggestions, offering many little-known tips, include: how older people can live in their own homes for as long as possible; what social services departments and the NHS can be made to provide; how to choose a care home; whether an older person should move in with relatives; how to keep afloat financially and how to stay healthy and happy. This book is destined to become an indispensable guide for older people and their relatives and friends as well as professionals working in the field of later life.

Age-Net says. This is undoubtedly a useful work and the collection of references and contact details alone make it a worthwhile purchase. If we have a single criticism, it would be with the type size which some of our readers will struggle with.

Marion Shoard is an investigative writer whose previous books include the award-winning A Right to Roam. She found herself thrown into the world of eldercare in the mid-1990s when her mother became frail and developed Alzheimer's disease. Marion currently lives in Dorking, Surrey.