Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to  November 2025 and season 11 of the podcast,. We are celebrating our 4th Birthday in November and my guest today, Claire Le Day aka GP Steph celebrates her 40th birthday in November. Claire/Steph is here to talk about her fabulous med school diaries which have been published as Fear and Loathing in Plymouth . If you are looking for a book to make you think, to take you...

Send us Fan Mail To celebrate the end of season 10 and our 4th birthday, today's episode is a little bit different. I've chosen a small snippet of each of the most downloaded episodes from seasons 1-10. I hope you'll enjoy a trip down memory lane! Episodes featured: S1 Jo Stewart and I discuss Instrumental by James Rhodes S2 Ed Pooley joins me to discuss Counselling for Toads S3 Emm...

Send us Fan Mail It is a huge pleasure today to welcome doctor and writer, Majid Parsa. We're talking about The Ayatollah's Gaze: a memoir of the forbidden and the fabulous , which is his first boook. What a book and what a memoir it is. I absolutely loved it.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked it up. It has a phenomenal pink cover. It is wise. It is insightful. It is...

Send us Fan Mail It's a real treat today to welcome one of the authors of Ultra Women , Emma Wilkinson to the podcast. Ultra Women , written by Emma Wilkinson and Lily Canter, is a book which rather defies classification. It is a book about women doing extraordinary things in the fields of endurance sport, but it's very much not a "sports book". We've got wonderful stories...

Send us Fan Mail Suzanne O'Sullivan's The Age of Diagnosis was hotly awaited and has received a lot of discussion on social media and in the national press.  Ben Tyler and I had both really enjoyed her former books and looked forward to this book.  Overdiagnosis is a bit of a hot topic lately, but as I hope we manage to explore, keeping curiosity and compassion at the forefront of what w...

Send us Fan Mail John Harris' excellent book  Maybe I'm Amazed has been one of my non-fiction top reads this year. It was a huge pleasure to welcome James Booth to the podcast to discuss it, and share some of our experiences.  We are both GPs, we are both parents of autistic young people and we both found John's book relatable, funny, warm, moving and necessary. If you want to know...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to Dr. Ahmed Handy, who is here to talk about his memoir, Quacks . We've recorded today my favourite bookshop, which is Scarthin Books in Cromford, near Matlock. If the sound is a little bit different to how you might expect the podcast to sound, I hope you'll bear with us. There were a few people in the background. There were loads of people looking...

Send us Fan Mail Medication, Mental Illness and Murder. What Really Killed the Crespi Twins? s ounds like the title of a true crime book or a thriller. I suppose you could call this a true crime. This is an incredibly good book, which has really, really challenged me. I'm delighted to be welcoming Ed Jones, the author to the podcast today. It's quite a hard read in places. It's a st...

Send us Fan Mail It's a huge pleasure today to welcome Martin Brunet to Bedside Reading. We are talking about his fabulous book, Your Worry Makes Sense . You may have discovered Martin on Instagram where he's a bit of a mental health sensation. He is such a wonderful communicator and an incredible translator of knowledge. And this comes across absolutely brilliantly in this fantastic boo...

Send us Fan Mail Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshanathan, which won the Women's Prize last year, was my absolute top read of 2024. It's been a real joy to revisit it today with Kathleen Weneden to think about the wonders of the storytelling and the importance of hearing stories from the perspective of people who often do not have their own narratives captured, Some of the themes in Brother...

Send us Fan Mail  I'm delighted to welcome Jo Rose to the podcast to talk about The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clark. This is an incredibly moving book which I was delighted to see won the 2025 Women's Prize for non-fiction. It interweaves the stories of two children, Kiera and who has died after a road traffic accident, and Max, who has cardiomyopathy, severe heart failure, and is await...

Send us Fan Mail I've got two guests with me today, Joanna Bircher and Ben Allen, two GPs who are talking about a book they've both been involved in. Joanna is one of the co-editors of a collection of stories from leaders in Primary Care. The stories featured are not just from GPs, there's a really, really wide range of primary care professionals talking about leadership and what le...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome back to the podcast today to novelist Rebecca Wait. We are today talking about her fabulous novel Havoc, which was published in July 2025. We recorded it just before it was released into the world. As this episode  goes out it's been flying off the shelves for a few weeks now. It is an excellent, excellent book. If you are looking for something to pack and take...

Send us Fan Mail Today I am delighted to be talking to Heidi Edmondson, consultant in emergency medicine from London. We are talking about her second book, her memoir Bellyfull . This is the story of Heidi's own journey through a very serious and rare illness and her strategies for denial, for adaptation, and for keeping on, keeping on, really beyond the point at which most of us would perhap...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever suffered from imposter syndrome? I think most healthcare professionals have done at some point during their lives. Today's book is one which seeks to address many of the factors that influence that. Though interestingly, the writer Tara Mohr doesn't ever use the phrase "imposter syndrome". I'm here today with Sam Powell to talk about Playing...

Send us Fan Mail Regular listeners may remember that I always say that I don't like fantasy and also how excited that I get when I am able to talk to an author. So I'm delighted today to welcome Joe Moore to Bedside Reading to talk about his young adult novel, which is called Blue Suns and Skyshine. It's quite a difficult book to categorise. And I think we've decided that it&ap...

Send us Fan Mail It's a huge pleasure to welcome the brilliant Becky Platt to Bedside Reading this week. We're talking about Needle by Patrice Lawrence.  Becky is an ACP in paediatric emergency medicine in London. She's also part of the exec for Don't Forget the Bubbles, an amazing open access medical education organisation. https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/ Becky's compas...

Send us Fan Mail A very warm welcome today to retired paediatrician, Dr Harry Stone, who is here today to talk about his memoir, Trust Me, I'm Exhausted, How Not to Train a Doctor . This is a really engaging medical memoir, one framed by an admission as a patient to the hospital that retired Dr Stone worked in. As he lies in a hospital bed, before he lies in a hospital bed, as he lies on a tr...

Send us Fan Mail I'm really delighted today to welcome Scott Weingart to  Bedside Reading. Scott is an emergency critical care physician from New York and  the host of the EMCrit blog and podcast https://emcrit.org/ We are today talking about Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg. This is such a brilliant accessible book which has really got me thinking a lot about what we need, h...

Send us Fan Mail A very warm welcome today to midwife and educator Suzanne Crozier. We are talking about a book called The Midwife by Tricia Cresswell, which is an absolutely brilliant historical fiction novel, which Suzanne and I both enjoyed enormously for some similar and some different reasons. The Midwife is set in rural Northumberland and in Victorian London. And it's one of those brill...

Send us Fan Mail I'm really pleased today to be welcoming Georgia Vine to Bedside Reading. Georgia is an OT and is the author of Occupational Therapy, Disability Activism and Me, Challenging Ableism in Healthcare , which is a bit of a mouthful of a title for a very slim and absolutely brilliant, brilliant book. Georgia is an OT, she is an educator at the University of Huddersfield and she als...

Send us Fan Mail I'm here today with Laura Spells to talk about a book called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. And we are thinking about Gen Z in particular and the generation behind that, the younger children. We're thinking about smartphone use. We're thinking about the effect that phones and social media have on developing brains. The move that has happened in the world...

Send us Fan Mail It is a great pleasure today to re-release an episode from back in season 7 to celebrate the paperback edition of to Jane Campbell’s novel “Interpretations of Love” which was published on 5th June  Jane joined me to talk about her first novel, Interpretations of Love.  Regular listeners may know that I've talked about one of Jane's books before, which is a short story co...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to season 10 of Bedside Reading and what a series I've got lined up for you this time around! I am delighted to be launching today with two very special guests, Debbie Hicks and Gemma Jolly from The Reading Agency. The Reading Agency is an absolutely wonderful charity and their Reading Well "Books on Prescription" scheme is absolutely fantastic. If you don&a...

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