A Passion for Living

Description

Our lives are precious. Never more so than for 19-year-old Alexander Stobbs who has been a cystic fibrosis sufferer from birth. For him, each day could be his last. But as he says you can t do stuff if you re afraid .A truly inspiring story of a young musician determined to live his dreams, Alex takes us on his journey to survive a daily round of drugs and treatments as he also prepares for his next ambition: to conduct Bach s three-hour-long St Matthew Passion. Everything we take for granted is a struggle for Alex eating, sleeping, even breathing. His determination to live life to the full, constantly striving for perfection in his musical performance, is set against the exhausting every day rigours of medication and treatment simply to keep him alive. Yet he has already achieved some extraordinary goals. An Eton scholar, he won a further music scholarship to King s College, Cambridge. Introduced here by his mother Suzanne, Alex s account of living with no certainty about his future is a spur to all of us to make every day count.

Alex was a music scholar at Eton College and took his A levels in 2008. He is now a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge, where he is reading music. He lives with his family in Kent and this is his first book.

PRAISE FOR THE DOCUMENTARY A BOY CALLED ALEX - : [Alex] was vastly intelligent, perpetually good-humoured, at no point lapsing into either self-pity or fatalism . . . I would guess Alex's cheerfulness was a quite conscious piece of defiance. - Independent Alex s final thumbs-up as he took his curtain call expressed the sheer exhilarating joy in being alive. - Times Online