Bedside Reading

Send us Fan MailBrotherless 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 Brotherless Night, have really, really stayed with me. This is an absolutely phenomenal novel. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's been a real privilege to talk to Kathleen about it and to think about things that are all relevant to all of us from this novel.

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 awaiting a heart transplant.This is the story of how Kiera's heart becomes Max's heart, along with an incredible supporting cast of clinicians and of families, and with segues out into the history of transplant, the origins of ATLS, and It is astonishingly moving and beautiful book, which I absolutely adored. It was such a great joy to talk to Jo about it and revisit it and think again of the beautiful storytelling and the importance of this type of story.

Send us Fan MailI'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 leadership means for them in a really practical sense of how they have done the things that they've done. It was a really, really fabulous conversation to have with the two of them, thinking about what leadership is, why it's so important to remember that you can't be what you can't see, and why our perception of leadership actually might be holding us back from being the leader that we could be.

Send us Fan MailA 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 on holiday with you, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the absolutely compelling and completely bonkers story of Ida, a teenager from the north of Scotland who feels she needs to get away from her life and writes to a variety of girls' boarding schools in Englanddesperate to go somewhere else and to escape. Out of the frying pan into the fire, she ends up at an incredibly eccentric, failing, small girls boarding school in the south of England, where all sorts of things start to happen.It is such a brilliantly written novel. I absolutely loved it. And I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to Rebecca today about it.

Send us Fan MailToday 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 perhaps have succumbed to the overwhelming fatigue and general malaise that she was suffering from.She explores this in relation to the way that the and NHS and emergency medicine in particular keeps on keeping on working in a broken and failing system, but somehow has that ability to just get up and get on with things.Bellyfull is an absolutely brilliant book. There is so much warmth, humanity, kindness and optimism within there. It's a really, really good read. And I have loved talking to Heidi about it today.

Send us Fan MailHave 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 Big by Tara Mohr. This is a really accessible leadership book, thinking about why women often "play small",why they don't necessarily push themselves forward, why they let their inner critic sabotage the amazing ideas that they've got and things that they want to do.It is book filled with lots and lots of practical wisdom, which I have thoroughly enjoyed talking about.

Send us Fan MailRegular 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's magic realism, though Joe's decided that he'd quite like to invent a completely new genre, which is called magical realism thriller and maybe it's that as well!! This story is a quest. It's a coming of age story. A adolescent boy is left a series of letters by his grandfather, which lead him on a magical mystery tour around the British Isles, ostensibly to scatter his granddad's ashes in a place that is special to his granddad and unknown to young David. There is a wonderful cast of characters that we meet along the way. It's a really, really interesting intriguing entertaining novel which in spite of not being my usual sort of book to read I have thoroughly enjoyed and I've really enjoyed talking to Joe about it today

Send us Fan MailIt'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 compassion, her willingness to see young people as themselves, to be thinking about things from other people's perspectives, and to be doing the right thing by young people, even when that is difficult.or not the easiest option, really shone through in our conversation today about Patrice Lawrence's brilliant short novel, Needle.Becky is an incredible storyteller in her own right. Here's a link  to her brilliant TED Talk, which is all about providing love and compassion in the emergency department.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psdgiqsacdc

Send us Fan MailA 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 trolley, as he experiences some of the most challenging care that the NHS is able to offer in corridors, in overpopulated wards, understaffed situations, he reflects on his own journey as a doctor, his training as a medical student, his junior doctor years.Harry reflects on the changes that he saw through a long career in the NHS and thinks about some of his experiences as a patient and as a doctor and how being a doctor who is also a patient can really frame our thinking, change it and challenge it It's a really accessible book which I enjoyed reading and it's been great to talk to Dr Stone today.

Send us Fan MailI'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, how important bringing our own feelings into a conversation are, but the importance of owning those feelings, observing what is going on, being responsible only for ourselves, and recognising that when we choose to do something, rather than feel compelled to do it, everything is so much better. I have loved rediscovering this book, and it has been absolutely fantastic to talk about it, with Scott.EMCrit is on Bluesky @emcrit.bsky.social, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/emcrit and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/emcrit