They were just five words, separated by four tiny full stops and four spaces: “brother. do. you. love. me.” But when, in November 2020, that text from Reuben Coe, who was alone in his room in a care home in Dorset, arrived on the phone of his brother Manni in Andalusia there was little else he could do. Manni had to get him out.
The book tells the story of their journey together during Covid and how they wrote and drew their way through one of their biggest ever challenges. Their pictures and words communicate with one another but also express the voices of two interweaving individual lives. It also describes their lives growing up in the Yorkshire Dales, then Berkshire, with their parents in a family of four brothers – a life that “orbited the church”, writes Manni. At one point they lived in the care home that their father ran.
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