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Coutts's book was chosen from a shortlist of six finalists for
the 30,000 pound ($46,300) cash award, the London-based Wellcome
Trust, a biomedical research charity, said in a statement.
"Marion Coutts's account of living with her husband's illness
and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed," writer
and humorist Bill Bryson, the chair of judges, said.
"Reading it, you have the sense of something truly unique being
brought into the world -- it stays with you for a long time
after."
Coutts's book describes the changes in the lives of her critic
and historian husband, their young son and her own as they
grappled with Lubbock's diagnosis in 2008 that he had a grade
four tumor that was seated in the area of the brain controlling
speech and language.
Lubbock managed to write his own book, "Until Further Notice, I
Am Alive", which was published in 2012, after his death in
January 2011. Coutts's book describes the rituals of nursing and
caring for Lubbock, the impact on her work as an artist, and her
own reactions to living with a dying man.
"I have never cried like this. The fatigue of it is seismic,"
she writes at one point.
Other works shortlisted for the prize awarded to a fiction or
non-fiction book published in Britain that meets the criterion
of appealing to "the incurably curious" were: "Do No Harm" by
Henry Marsh, "Bodies of Light" by Sarah Moss, "The Incredible
Unlikeliness of Being" by Alice Roberts, "My Age of Anxiety" by
Scott Stossel and "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews.
(Reporting by Michael Roddy; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
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