What is resilience? And why is it an important subject for research? Anne Deveson – former royal commissioner, noted documentary maker and social justice activist – explores these questions in her latest book. Human resilience is linked to courage, love, defiance and stoicism, and enables us to come through suffering with integrity. It requires hope and produces strength and action, while its absence results in weakness and victimhood, even despair. But no one seems sure exactly what it is. Deveson’s book opens with a quotation from Jeanette L. Johnson, suggesting that resilience may be ‘the poetry of life’ and that as yet ‘there is no language to share it’. That does not stop Deveson from trying to contribute to its dissemination.