Bedside Reading

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,...

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...