Danny’s People: A Memoir and Manifesto about Autism By Virginia Bovell Oneworld Publications. August 2024. £14.25 (hb). 320 pp.ISBN 978-0861548385

As clinicians, we become deeply engaged with the parents and children who come to us.Virginia Bovell's book takes us through the looking glass to the other side of such roles: into the lived experience of a mother and family adapting to neurodiversity and, within that, interacting with clinicians like us.Her book covers 30 years from the birth of her son Danny in 1993 to the present, a period that roughly corresponds to my own clinical lifespan.It has been an extraordinary period of rapidly shifting scientific understanding and social attitudes in relation to autism.She experiences all this with her family as a parent as Danny grows, but also increasingly as a writer and campaigner, engaging with the social, medical and science cultures as they evolveand, in the end, taking a doctorate.