Those interested search and reunion stories should listen out for Radio 4 before going to bed this week.

For the next five days, starting tonight at 12.30am, Brian Cox reads from All That Really Matters, Campbell Armstrong's moving memoir about his first wife Eileen and the daughter she gave up for adoption.

Glasgow-born thriller writer, who now lives in the Republic of Ireland, tells how his ex-wife was reunited with her daughter, only to discover that both were suffering from terminal cancer.

Eileen discovered she had lung cancer in the summer of 1997 and three months later, was contacted, from Yorkshire, by her long-lost daughter, Barbara, then aged 40.

Like many adopted children, she had spent years trying to track down her real mother despite getting little help from official sources.

Being diagnosed with ovarian cancer made Barbara all the more determined to find her mother. After years of fruitless searches in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, she managed to track down Sydney, Eileen's brother, in Glasgow.

After their reunion Armstrong recorded their next few harrowing months as the mother and daughter tried to pack everything they could into their short time together.

Barbara's resources were limited, but she managed to scrape together the money to see her mother three times before she died, spending hours on "girlie" activities like shopping and hairdressing and talking incessantly.

After her mother died Barbara battled on with her own cancer and died a year-and-a-half after Eileen.