Six million people in the UK provide unpaid care for disabled or elderly relatives or neighbours. Their job is long, lonely and hard, yet they are largely unnoticed and there is limited support and no formal training. As a result carers suffer frequent damage to physical and mental health.

Oddly, though carers by definition are anything but selfish pigs, they are prone to feelings of guilt, largely brought on by fatigue and isolation. Author Hugh Marriott, himself a long-term carer, has written this book for them – and also for everyone else who hadn’t realized what went on behind those closed doors. His aim is to bring into the open everything he wished he had been told when he first became a carer. And he does. The book airs topics such as sex, thoughts of murder, coping with incontinence, and dealing with the responses of friends and officials who fail to understand.

It’s thought-provoking, informative and brutally frank, but also funny and moving. "I chuckled and cried my way through it," said Vicky Howells of Carers Together in Hampshire.