Bedside Reading

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...

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...