After more than three years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch died in January this year. Early that month she was taken to a home for the terminally ill, and although she had to be removed by coercion, she quickly settled into the home, and remained radiant and calm for the last weeks of her life.The last year or so of Iris Murdoch's life provides the framework for Iris and the Friends, but within this structure John Bayley returns repeatedly to memories of his own earlier life, and of more than forty years of marriage to Iris. Alzheimer's is a lonely predicament for the carer, and Bayley describes how he coped with the ordeal of watching his wife become terminally ill by forming a growing dependency on memory as a stand-by, consolation, and friend. Read Less