There are 31,000 free copies of this book on the way to NHS staff in Birmingham, and the publishers are seeking sponsorship for a million copies, one for every NHS worker. Writers who have donated work to the prose and poetry anthology include A L Kennedy (“Thank you for my birth and for not letting me die after my fractured skull when I was 10 and for the two tetanus shots,” her supporting statement begins), Fay Weldon and Stevie Davies, whose contribution is a moving account of her daughter’s surgery for appendicitis. The pages capture breakthroughs, darkest hours and long afternoons in waiting rooms, wards and canteens. There’s surely enough desperation and drama in schools to generate a similar volume.

Also see “Fever” by Tom Yates, a former TES Young Poet, and the contributions from hospital staff including “Things Parents Don’t Say About Speech and Language Therapists” by Cheryl Palmer (“Personally I think she over-estimated what my Johnny can do”), and Mall Surjit’s “An Elegy from the Invisible Man” (the mortuary porter).

CROSSING THE BORDER: voices of refugee and exiled women. Edited by Jennifer Langer. Five Leaves. pound;9.99.

The second anthology compiled by Jennifer Langer, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland, who works in refugee education. We meet Farooka Gauhari, searching for her missing husband in Afghanistan in 1978 and Ayesha Tarzi, fleeing Russian-held Kabul some years later. In Middlesex in the 1980s, after leaving Iran, Rouhi Shafi reflects: “At the beginning I used to explain myself to people I met. Soon I realised that I bored them. These were people with few complications in their lives.” Alongside 40 first-person contributions there are appendices on women’s lives and writing in countries including Somalia, Kosovo and the Congo.

WRITE FOR CHILDREN. By Andrew Melrose. RoutledgeFalmer. pound;13.99.

Now that J K Rowling is richer than Madonna and Guy Ritchie together (according to the Sunday Times Rich List), publishers’ slush piles are set to reach epic proportions. Melrose (director of the MA course in writing for children at King Alfred’s College, Winchester) holds out no promise of wealth in this slim but scholarly guide to turning your big idea into something publishable. He doesn’t tell you how to get an agent, whether you should bind or staple your manuscript or how to negotiate film rights, preferring to concentrate on what you need to get right first: becoming a better writer through mini-workshops on character, viewpoint and plot, researching your market and considering which kinds of books serve children best. Read the section “Write the Height” even if that’s all you can manage: it offers practical advice and common sense alongside creative and critical content.