Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome back today to Greater Manchester GP, Zalan Alam. Today we are talking about Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple, which is an incredibly readable and very accessible, though enormous book about the five partitions of British India. It is something that  really captivated me. There are so many brilliant human interest stories and it's really made me understand some...

Send us Fan Mail A really warm welcome to neurodevelopmental forensic psychiatrist Claudia Camden-Smith today, where we're talking about Patric Gagne's memoir, Sociopath . This is such an interesting book, which really gripped me, made me think an awful lot, challenged a lot of my thinking, and it's something I've thought a lot about since I finished it. So it has been a real j...

Send us Fan Mail I'm really, really delighted today to be talking to Selina Flinders about an absolutely wonderful book, These Heavy Black Bones, by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell. This is a memoir written someone that some of you may have come across as a very high-level swimmer who swam originally for Kenya and then started to swim for Great Britain and crashed out of professional swimming j...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to season 12 of the podcast!!! What a season I've got lined up for you this time round. We are starting today with an astonishing book written by an astonishing woman and it is such a treat today to be talking to Maria Milland. Danish obstetrician gynaecologist who has been deployed many times on humanitarian missions in the world. Her book Born at the Gates of Hell i...

Send us Fan Mail I'm taking a little break from recording podcasts over Easter, and I'm really excited that I'm actually going away for a few days.  I've got a lot on my to-read pile, which I'm going to be taking with me. Some electronically to avoid filling up my suitcase too full, and some fabulous hard copies of some novels that I am absolutely desperate to read.  So wh...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to Ellen Basuk and Daniel Schoonover, the authors of Between Two Worlds , a wonderful mother-son memoir of Daniel's mental health difficulties and diagnosis at the age of 19, schizophrenia, and his mum, Ellen, a psychiatrist's approach to enabling Daniel to live a good life and get the support that he needed. It's a book which really made me thi...

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome Shannon Ivey to Bedside Reading today. We are talking about her wonderful memoir, Welcome to the Shit Show , her story of being diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer 10 years ago at the age of 42. It is brilliant to know that Shannon is still with us, still making people laugh, still full of energy and vitality. I absolutely loved her book. It made me l...

Send us Fan Mail Sunday 8th of March was International Women's Day and so today, Tuesday  10th is our special International Women's Day themed episode where I am talking to Charley Baker about the horrifying, eye-opening and thought-provoking book that is The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates. This is a book which has really changed me. It has opened my eyes to so many aspects of technolo...

Send us Fan Mail I think that there is sometimes a bit of snobbery around genres of books. The self-help market is huge. It's there for a reason but I think sometimes those of us who really enjoy self-help feel that perhaps we should be going to some kind of self-help books anonymous club where we can talk about our love of the genre unimpeded by the judgment of others! Last year, Anna Bavers...

Send us Fan Mail I'm not entirely sure whether Anita and I have really even scratched the surface of a discussion about Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We've both acknowledged that Chimamanda is one of our absolutely favourite novelists and her new novel, Dream Count , does not disappoint on any front. There are themes galore in this book. There are stories of four rather differ...

Send us Fan Mail Poor by Katrina O'Sullivan is a book which has really, really stayed with me. I listened to it as an audiobook and I could not stop listening.  I think it helps that Katrina has a fabulous voice, but actually the voice, both physically and in what she is talking about, is so powerful and so compelling. It was a real joy to talk to Lydia Fairhurst about this brilliant book, wh...

Send us Fan Mail I love it when a guest approaches me and says, "please, can I talk about this book?" especially when it's a book that I've never, ever come across before. And today is one of those days. We are talking about The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas, which is an absolutely beautiful, very short Norwegian novel published in the 1950s, which I had never come across before. My l...

Send us Fan Mail I'm really pleased today to welcome Dr Richard Duggins to Bedside Reading to talk about his book, Burnout Free Working . We know that burnout is incredibly common in all professionals, particularly in health professionals. We also know that it is not always something we are talking enough about. Frustratingly, it is both preventable and incredibly, incredibly treatable. If on...

Send us Fan Mail I always enjoy talking to my guests about books. Sometimes I don't enjoy the book they've chosen. Often I am surprised by how much I have enjoyed something that I wasn't expecting to enjoy.  Today, though, is different to all of that. It's a real joy to welcome Ripon Ahmed back to the podcast to talk about what must be one of my all-time favourite novels featur...

Send us Fan Mail i've had the best fun setting up and recording today's podcast with Caryn Price and Georgina Benger. We are talking about a book that they have written together called Olive's Day . We also mentioned Willow's Day , which is the second in a series which we hope will be going to be. quite a big series of fabulous books written ostensibly for children but from whi...

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome Louise Persaud to Bedside Reading today to talk about a beautiful and very thought-provoking novel. Pearl by Sian Hughes. T "After she left, I wondered, had I been spirited it away or had she? Was I still in the real world or was this some land of bad copy? What if my mother was looking everywhere for me, calling my name? What if I could fall bac...

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome Hannah Loret to Bedside Reading today to talk about Overspill by Charlotte Paradise. This is a really gripping, absolutely brilliant novel. The blurb: Sara is 25. She's never used a tampon without having a panic attack. She starts dating Miles. Three months, they don't touch. Miles respects her boundaries, though he longs for them to melt aw...

Send us Fan Mail It's that strange time of year that we sometimes refer to as Twixtmas again.  I hope people have received lots of fantastic new books to start reading, have eaten a bit too much, drunk a bit too much and are starting to think about plans for 2026.  I've gathered together some friends of the podcast to have a think back over their year of reading in 2025 and to come up wi...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome today to emergency physician, Johnny Acheson, who is here to talk about his book, When Your Neurons Dance, which is a journey through Johnny's own diagnosis with Parkinson's disease at the age of 41. We explore some of the lessons that he has learned from lived experience of being a doctor, living and working with Parkinson's disease, thinking about t...

Send us Fan Mail The Names by Florence Knapp is undoubtedly one of my top fiction reads of 2025, if not my absolute top read of 2025. It is an astonishing first novel, which follows three different storylines, all based on what Cora names her baby boy. Will she call him Gordon? (the name chosen by her husband, also Gordon.) Will she call him Julian? Or will she call him Bear, the name suggested by...

Send us Fan Mail Shred Sisters, the debut novel by Betsy Lerner, was a real highlight of my summer reading this year. It is fabulous novel about a family, particularly about two sisters, Amy and Ollie, and the effect that Ollie's mental illness has on her, on her sister, and on the wider family. It's been a great joy today to be talking to the author, Betsy Lerner. This is Betsy's f...

Send us Fan Mail How Christmasy are you feeling? It's December now and I know for some people this is a really exciting time of year. Today's podcast has been the best fun to record and is about a book which I absolutely adored. In fact, the only thing I didn't like about today's book is the fact that I didn't read it for the first time in December because it is a proper w...

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome Professor Paul Crawford to the podcast today. We are talking about his novel, The Wonders of Dr Bent, described in the publisher's blurb as "a twisted tale of murder, revenge and abandonment." It is sort of a crime thriller, but there's so much more to this novel. There are some beautiful characters. There are two main protagonists...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome back today to GP Kirsty Shires, who's here today to talk with me about Jacqueline Harpman's 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men. This is an absolutely astonishing book. It is dystopian fiction at its best, I think. It is human, it is connected, it is thought-provoking, it is bizarre. There's so much to think about packed into 200 very short pages....

Send us Fan Mail Educated by Tara Westover is one of those books which has really stayed with me since I first read it back in 2018. It's also a book that I just assumed when I started this podcast that somebody would approach me and want to talk about. It feels astonishing that we've got as far as season 11 before anybody has asked to come on and discuss it. I'm glad I waited, thou...