Bedside Reading

Send us Fan Mail Today's episode, the final one of series 3,  is all about a topic which doesn't get spoken about enough: coercive control.  We've specifically chosen to release it today, Valentine's Day, because we know that underneath the public face of all too many "happy" relationships there's a darker story at play. Victoria Cilliers' chilling memoir I...

Send us Fan Mail Joanna Nadin's The Queen of Bloody Everything , is about mothers, daughters and how we can make many choices in life but can't choose where we come from. As Edie Jones lies in a bed on the fourteenth floor of a Cambridge hospital, her adult daughter Dido tells their story, starting with the day that changed everything. That was the day Dido - aged exactly six years and t...

Send us Fan Mail A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won’t let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an NHS ambulance paramedic. Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for ten years: every day, he sees a dozen of t...

Send us Fan Mail I'm so delighted that Kathleen Wenaden asked to come and talk about the beautiful, gentle evocative book with me because this has been one of my reading highlights in the past few weeks. This is a wonderful gentle record of a small world, centred around a small terraced house in the West Midlands and the diary of a year in the life of an invisible illness. The Guardian review...

Send us Fan Mail It was a really pleasure to talk to GP and writer Sophie Harrison about her book  The Cure for Good Intentions which was a BBC Radio 4 book of the week back in May 2022 and which is a fabulous insight into the storytelling world of medicine.  We talk about crossing over from arts to sciences and how the art of medicine and the storytelling is the most joyous part of what we do. Fo...

Send us Fan Mail Maggie O'Farrell is one of my favourite writers and it was such a pleasure to reread her memoir I am I am I am for todays episode when I'm discussing it with Sally Davies. We talk about where we read (in the lift at work anyone?!), what we read and why reading is so valuable to us both. We also explore  the risk-taking decisions of young brains, how common near death exp...

Send us Fan Mail Set Boundaries, Find Peace had a title which both intrigued and slightly scared me.  The author Nedra Glover Tawab is something of an instagram sensation, for very good reason. It was brilliant to connect with Aukland Nurse Educator, Erin Carn-Bennett to discuss boundaries and why health professionals are often so bad at them. If you are thinking about a New Year new you type of a...

Send us Fan Mail It's a funny time of year, one of endings and beginnings and what better way to mark the end of 2022 than to have some friends of the podcast, old and new to review their favourite books of 2022 and think about some to-read ideas for 2023.  Nine healthcare professional guests and I share some highlights and anticipated reads. A huge thank you to Pim Dhahan https://twitter.com...

Send us Fan Mail I'm delighted to welcome back an old friend of the podcast, Catriona Davis to talk about a real classic ghost story - Henry James' The Turn of the Screw  which starts on Christmas Eve and is the ideal short novella if you want a creepy, dark, ghost story for a cold dark night. We talk about unreliable narrators, "spider sense" and how we get into trouble becaus...

Send us Fan Mail Ingrid Persaud's  debut novel Love After Love blew me away the first time I read it in 2020 shortly after it was published.  Re-reading it recently for this podcast has made me love it even more. The title of this novel is from the Derek Walcott poem Love After Love - find it here https://allpoetry.com/love-after-love it is also so moving and thought provoking. Anita and I ta...

Send us Fan Mail "It’s the summer of 1935, and young Briony sees her older sister Cecilia plunge nearly naked into the fountain of their country house, while Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, is watching. From that moment, their lives will never be the same. Atonement is the tragically compelling story of two lovers fallen victims of a young girl’s scheming imagination, and a dreadful cri...

Send us Fan Mail **SPOILER ALERT** We tried hard to keep the twist a secret here but then Rahhiel got a bit carried away and mentioned a little part of it and then we kept talking and it was too hard to go back and decide to record this all over again. So if you've not read this incredible book and are adamant you'd want absolutely no spoilers at all, you might need to read it first.  If...

Send us Fan Mail This week's book choice is the newest novel by prolific American writer Kristin Hannah.  Set in the dust bowl of the USA in the 1930s it's historical fiction covering a time period my guest, Kathryn Oliver, and I knew little of before we picked it up.  We'd initially  read this novel as part of a HEE educator book club and I admit that having been blown away by earl...

Send us Fan Mail Naveen Jayadev is a GP in North Derbyshire and a Training Programme Director for the Chesterfield and Derbyshire Dales GP Training Programme with a specialist interest in Differential Attainment.  He was born and educated in India.  We got together to talk about How India Works a book which might not initially seem relevant to medicine, written by a corporate trainer from an India...

Send us Fan Mail This novel by Elif Shafak is undoubtedly my top read of 2022 and so it was a delight to be approached by Sabina Dosani to discuss it.  We talk about intergenerational trauma, adolescent norms, loss, escapism and much more. There's a theme of roots, of secrets, things buried and things left unsaid.  It's a sensational novel and one I am so glad to have read. Follow her on...

Send us Fan Mail Rebecca Schiller's memoir Earthed was described by today's guest, Anna Young,  as "like a car crash told in prose poetry".  This is a beautiful book, in places not an easy read and one in which we both acknowledge that we "missed" the (in retrospect obvious) diagnosis in spite of thinking we were pretty good at our jobs in primary care. We talk about...

Send us Fan Mail It was an honour and a pleasure to record today's episode with one of the most engaging, gracious and thoughtful people I've met.  Liz O'Riordan, writer, speaker, campaigner, breast cancer patient and breast surgeon. When I joined Twitter Liz  O'Riordan quickly became someone I was aware of and fascinated to follow.  She is a #medtwitter hero and an incredible...

Send us Fan Mail Could this be one of the most devastatingly beautiful books I've ever read? A rollercoaster of emotions from hope to despair and back again. A love story about a woman who is fatally flawed, doing her best, loving and losing and a small boy whose world in 1980s Glasgow is bright vividly to life in Douglas Stuart's wonderful first novel. Helen Blomfield was the perfect gu...

Send us Fan Mail Absolutely brilliant to talk to Jay Baruch about his fabulous book Tornado of Life.  We talk about making time for stories, narrative arcs and why uncertainty is the most fascinating part of everything we do. Exploring the concept of creativity as a clinical skill and discussing the anatomy of stories was all part of our fabulous conversation, I hope you'll enjoy it Follow Ja...

Send us Fan Mail I really loved my conversation with Associate Professor of mental health and self confessed "book pusher" Charley Baker about Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine   Gail Honeyman's wonderful novel about loneliness, friendship, belonging and acceptance. We explore Charley's opinion that novels are by far the best way for everyone to explore feelings and opinions...

Send us Fan Mail It was a huge honour to have this book and this guest to launch series 3.  I was approached by Ru's publicist to ask if I might consider speaking to him and was sent my first ever pre-publication copy of a book. What an absolute treat the book was, I absolutely adored it and speaking to Ru himself was just a delight.   When he became an undertaker, Rupert Callender undertook...

Send us Fan Mail Watching Brene Brown's "power of vulnerability" TED talk was a life changing moment for me as a clinician and when I started reading more of her work I was blown away. I didn't think there could be a book of hers as good as "Daring Greatly", I was wrong. Atlas of the Heart is such a beautiful book in the way it looks, it feels, the illustrations and o...

Send us Fan Mail Sam Guglani's novella Histories captivated me from the moment I picked it up and having reread it more than once has compelled me and made me think so much. It was a huge treat to welcome him onto the podcast to talk about the book and especially how it came to be and to share some of our favourite moments. Medicine Unboxed Sam's incredible festival is back in May 2023,...

Send us Fan Mail A warm welcome to Manchester based GP registrar Lava Yuki who grew up in Ireland and is an almost exact contemporary of the writer of this week's book.   Evanna Lynch is best known for playing Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter film series and her memoir The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting   is a compelling story of what happens when you lose your creativity and how Anorexia Ner...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is MedTwitter royalty in the form of Bethan John. Follow her brilliant twitter self here: https://twitter.com/msbethanj We talk about Kristen Neff's brilliant book Self Compassion and why doctors seem somehow so hardwired to be perfectionists who put themselves down at every opportunity.