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Send us Fan Mail What happens when a failed bank robbery becomes an accidental hostage situation, trapping a group of strangers in an apartment viewing over the festive period? In this episode, I'm joined by GP Dr Sophie Gerring to discuss Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, a novel that combines humour, mystery and humanity in equal measure. Together we explore why this deceptively light-hear...

Send us Fan Mail What do we reach for when our heart is broken, and reading an entire novel feels completely beyond us? In this episode, I welcome back poetry anthologist Ana Sampson to talk about her wonderful new collection, You Can Do It With a Broken Heart , a book of poems for anyone weathering the end of a relationship. Ana and I talk about why poetry can be particularly powerful when we’re...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Bedside Reading , I’m joined by Emily Tammam to talk about Virginia Evans' The Correspondent , a novel told through the letters and emails of 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp. What begins as a conversation about a wonderfully prickly older woman and the lost art of letter-writing takes us into much deeper territory.  Emily is  a writer, painter and speaker. Sh...

Send us Fan Mail This week Tara is joined by fellow GP Francesca to discuss Lisa Ridzén’s beautiful and heartbreaking novel When the Cranes Fly South . Bo is an elderly man determined to remain in his own home, surrounded by his memories and, most importantly, his beloved dog Sixten. But as he becomes increasingly frail, his son and carers have different ideas about what is best for him. Tara and...

Send us Fan Mail I think Michelle Hills' book The Wrong Order of Things is a contender for my non-fiction read of the year in 2026. It is so readable. It is so engaging. It is funny. It is moving. It is kind. Michelle is an absolute inspiration. I have absolutely loved my conversation with her today and I can't tell you how much I loved The Wrong Order of Things . It is, ostensibly, a bo...

Send us Fan Mail Caroline Litman's memoir, Her Name is Alice , was one of my top reads of 2025. And so it feels like a real honour today to welcome Caroline herself to Bedside Reading to talk about her absolutely brilliant book. This is a memoir. It is about Caroline's life. She's a former doctor, turned Pilates teacher, turned writer and activist. And it is a book about her family....

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Season 13 of Bedside Reading. In this episode, I am delighted to be joined by Dr Helen Haynes, to discuss her novel A Bridge Across Minds: Mental Illness, Grief and the Fragile Brain . Helen is an old age psychiatrist and, as the saying goes, writers are often encouraged to write about what they know. Set on an older adults' psychiatric ward, this is not a textbook...

Send us Fan Mail As we reach the end of Season 12, I'm delighted to close with a truly special conversation. In this episode, I speak with author, illustrator, educator, and autism advocate Eliza Fricker about her latest book, Could Try Harder . Written in a graphic novel format, the book draws on Eliza's own experiences growing up as an autistic girl and young woman who remained undiagn...

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome Ian Seymour to Bedside Reading to discuss the first two novels in Armistead Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series: Tales of the City and More Tales of the City. These are books I have returned to repeatedly throughout my adult life, and each time I revisit them, I discover something new to love. Rich in warmth, humour, compassion, and humanit...

Send us Fan Mail I do love an unputdownable page-turner, especially when it's dystopian feminist fiction, and The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami delivers on every front. In this episode of Bedside Reading , I'm delighted to welcome Victoria Sweetmore to the podcast to discuss this compelling and thought-provoking novel. What begins as a gripping speculative thriller quickly opens up into a...

Send us Fan Mail A really warm welcome back today to somebody who I always really enjoy talking to. I'm delighted to have Ben Tyler here today to talk about Hungry by Katriona O'Sullivan, which is Katriona O'Sullivan's second memoir which addresses topics around body shaming, hunger for food, for love, for achievement. Ben has a really fascinating career, including a specialist...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to Dr. Alan Saxon, a retired general surgeon from Chicago and the USA and author of Training in Charity, which is an absolutely brilliant medical novel in the genre of something like the pit or ER casualty. It has appeal to people like me who are medical educators and fascinated by the way that medical students in the US were taught in the 1970s compared with...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to Pete Aird, who is here to talk about Henry Normal and Angela Pell's wonderful memoir, A Normal Family: Everyday Adventures with Our Autistic Son. This is a book which absolutely blew me away. I couldn't put it down.  I have adored Henry Normal's poetry for quite some time, and it was a really amazing window into the lives of two people, very...

Send us Fan Mail A really warm welcome today to Eva Hibbs, who is here to talk about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is an absolutely hilarious and very, very different novel i'm following a nine-year-old boy called Oscar in New York City following the death of his father. It's a really interesting,  thought-provoking novel with themes of undiagnosied ne...

Send us Fan Mail It's a real honour today to welcome Stephen Unwin to Bedside Reading. Stephen is a theatre director by trade. He's also a brilliant writer. We're here today to talk about his phenomenal book, Beautiful Lives, How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong , which is an incredibly accessible, brilliant page-turner of a book, which runs through some of the history of how s...

Send us Fan Mail There might be a little bit of squealy fangirling from me today... I'm delighted to welcome Lee David to the podcast. Lee is a GP by background. She's also a CBT therapist and I remember her from when I was a GP registrar, when she introduced the concept of 15-minute CBT and ran lots of amazing workshops around this. Lee also hosts an amazing podcast of her own but we&ap...

Send us Fan Mail I've got a fabulous guest today, Neonatologist and poet Beth Osmond, talking about her gorgeous collection, Hatchery. This is an utterly, utterly gorgeous collection of beautiful poems, mainly inspired by Beth's career as a Neonatologist. It is thought provoking, it is funny.,it is gentle, it is deep. There are so many things I could say about it. It is utterly, utterly...

Send us Fan Mail A very warm welcome today to Emma Vardy to talk about Pearl Buck's T he Child Who Never Grew, a memoir. I'm releasing it this week because this week on 28th of June, it is International PKU Day. As you will find there is a lot to think about in terms of phenylketonuria and also the fact that eventually, after the end of this book, and and and when science had advanced, P...

Send us Fan Mail Natalie Adler's debut novel, Waiting on a Friend , is a joy. It is a story about a young woman, Renata, living in New York's East Village in the early 80s during the AIDS crisis. There are stories of people.  There is injustice. There are ghosts. I don't normally like ghosts but I love the ghost angle of this book. If you're looking for a novel, which is a cros...

Send us Fan Mail It's a real pleasure today to welcome back Sarah Marwick, GP and Portfolio Career Doctor, to talk about Malcolm Gladwell's The Revenge of the Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell is such a brilliant and entertaining writer, and it is such a great book. There are so many stories. focusing on epidemics and social contagions. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking about the book w...

Send us Fan Mail I've got a special episode today as part of June 2026, Pride Month. A warm welcome to Isaac Grivalja We're talking about his debut novel, Six and a Half Days in the City, which is a very quick and compelling read, which follows a young Latino bisexual EMT as he gets on a plane from his home in California to New York for a week of leave. He's going to spend it with t...

Send us Fan Mail When I first really started thinking about medical humanities, torytelling and "accidental CPD", about 14 years ago, I set up the Chesterfield Medical Humanities Book Club, which is still running. The very first book that we talked about was Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which I had read before when it first came out and which I went back to and loved all over a...

Send us Fan Mail Creativity and Wellbeing Week runs from 18th - 24th May 2026. So this week I am bringing you an episode which is all about creativity in health, basing our conversation on the phenomenal book, Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt. If you haven't come across this book, it is absolutely brilliant.  Daisy has managed to distill into a few hundred pages a giant but incredibly accessible me...

Send us Fan Mail Kim Scott's Radical Candor had been on my to-read pile for years. I have no idea what it was that was stopping me picking it up. So I was delighted to be given the nudge by the very wise Michael Killshaw to pick it up.  I was not disappointed. it is such an accessible and brilliant book, relevant to anybody who works with people in a team, but particularly if you lead a team,...