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How far would you go to save your child’s life?
Bree Smith’s son, Adam, is dying.
Bree is out of money and out of hope when a dishevelled young man, Bateman, approaches her with a proven cure. There’s only one catch: Bree will need to collect it…from the future.
The cost? Just to return with a small package for Bateman.
Once in the future, Bree faces the terrible consequences of the deal she has struck. She must make a final choice: save her son or save humanity?
Conceived by terminal cancer patient, Joshua Castle and brought to print, posthumously, by his mother, Penny, Cure is fast-paced and tense. You won't put it down until you’ve reached the very last page.
Cure forces you to consider what price you would pay to save the one you love - and whose life you would willingly hang in the balance. Joshua Castle's writing is visceral and unforgettable.
Tayla Kaplan
I am Penny Castle. I live in Johannesburg with my husband Shannon and teenage son. I started a blog in 2016 with the intention of documenting my adventures in growing veggies and how they helped me become a happier person.
On the 21 January 2017 all that was forgotten. My elder son, Joshua, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer: cholangiocarcinoma. He died in January 2018.
Cure forces you to consider what price you would pay to save the one you love – and whose life you would willingly hang in the balance. Joshua Castle’s writing is visceral and unforgettable.
Tayla KaplanLatest news
It’s no way to live
Chris didn’t drop like a stone. He toppled, rigidly, like a falling tree. The security camera that caught his seizure shows a millisecond of confusion before he falls, with surprising grace, over the edge of the metre-high platform and onto the concrete floor. I wince even thinking about how his hands didn’t reach out to break his fall; how his head could have – but didn’t – hit the floor first; how narrowly the sheet-steel blades of the spotlight tumbling with him missed his torso.
Five days of EEG’s, CT-Scans, MRI’s and blood-work later, he has the all clear…for now. He’ll be back in a specialised epilepsy unit in a few weeks for a filmed EEG. We are 90% sure that the seizure was caused by a combination of a new medication and a lack of sleep. Given our recent medical history though, 90% isn’t enough. We’ll head back to make that 100%. For now, he’s back at school, pleased as punch to be signed off PE until the end of the term.
I’m not doing as well. My “take-when-you-need-to” stock of Urbanol is quickly becoming depleted. My heart races and my mind loops through the 24 hours where I explained over and over to a memory-wiped Chris where he was and what had happened.
The memory of another phone call, with another boy, is always here. Always hovering in the corner of my mind.
“You can’t live life always worrying if something will happen to your kids,” the psychiatrist tells me. But of course, he’s wrong. I can. I do.
And of course, he’s also right. He calls in anxiety. He tells me it’s only to be expected. He tells me that it won’t go away but in 2 – 5 years I might feel like I can cope with it. He tells me to set the bar lower, to celebrate not needing to be in a psych ward.
I call it terror. I call it waking at 3 am to check on Chris. I call it the memory of how I told myself to stop imaging the worst only to have some new and unimaginably terrible torment manifest in my kid. I call it knowing that I couldn’t have changed the outcome but still spending every day looking for that moment where a tiny choice could have set us on a different path. A cancer-free path. A seizure-free, path. A happily-ever-after path. A path with the comfort of everyday worries.
It’s no way to live. I know that. I don’t know how to change it.