"Never too late to learn," Shirley Worth's mother used to say, "and never too late to begin a new turning point in life."

She said it whenever someone wrote themselves off too soon. On the morning after her seventieth birthday, sitting alone in a bungalow that had grown very quiet, Shirley decided to take her mother at her word.

Never Too Late To Begin is the memoir of an ordinary English life lived with extraordinary honesty. It begins with a bedroom door that was locked every afternoon after school, and a mother who unlocked it the moment she got home from work. It moves through the December morning in 1966 when ten-year-old Shirley lost her sister, a first marriage that ended, and a quiet sorrow over the children who never came.

Then there is David. They married on a bitter January evening in 1990 and had thirty-six good years together. When Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's arrived, they took him from her slowly, in pieces small enough that she could tell herself a kinder story for a while. Shirley writes about the carer's hours with a clarity few books manage - the alertness that never switches off, the exhaustion, the strange grief of mourning someone who is still alive - and about the hardest door she ever had to close, the day he went into the care home.

But this is not a book about misery, and Shirley will tell you so herself. She laughs easily. She paints. She keeps a running tally of the good things, because she believes there is always something to put in the plus column, even on the worst day.

Written in the plain, warm, funny voice of a woman who has stopped putting herself last, Never Too Late To Begin is for anyone caring for someone they are losing, anyone grieving quietly, and anyone who has been told that their best days are behind them.

They are not. Shirley Worth is seventy years old, and this is her beginning.