In this powerful and gripping memoir, one of the country's top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death decisions he encounters daily. Clever, shocking and brutally candid, Henry Marsh never shirks the difficult questions be they moral, philosophical, ethical or emotional. The stories give us a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of a modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain - and the blunt instrument that is surgeon's knife in comparison. But above all this is a book about the moving personal dilemmas that lie behind every operation he performs, and his encounters with patients whose lives are balanced on a knife's edge. He is profoundly honest about his mistakes, failings and frustrations, as well as his triumphs. It is only with old age, experience and his own illness, he admits, that he has finally come to realise he is made of the same flesh and blood and his patients. At the heart of this book is a deeply personal account of a long and sometimes painful education over his thirty-year career - an education in Marsh's own fallibility, the limitations of medicine, the corruption of power and, above all, the human need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions.