'This short, stark book is a frontline bulletin from the operating theatre of a British hospital, giving us a surgeon’s-eye view of her work in painfully vivid detail… A valuable and unflinching account, for all its gruesomeness, since it so clearly tells us the truth' Sunday Times How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else’s body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? Gabriel Weston worked in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse.'A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance of expression heightened by both its clarity and economy. Weston slices into sentences with scalpel-like precision’ Observer‘A beautiful, haunting and upsetting book. Weston’s prose is cool and elegant’ Sunday Telegraph‘Writing as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery’ The Times‘Startling, sobering, engrossing book … every chapter contains something.it should be required reading for anyone interested in the alleviation of human suffering’ Anthony Quinn‘Gabriel Weston’s exactitude of expression is rare and uncanny, the more so for the sense one gets that this is a world in which the moral value of truthfulness is ambiguous. Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement.

This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty.’ Rachel Cusk‘What a terrific book. Gabriel Weston's voice is so seductive; her wisdom so fresh and earned, and unimpaired by sentimentality, and yet you sense her empathy - and scintillating honesty - behind every well-turned sentence' Nicholas Shakespeare‘As well-written and sensitive an account, by a decent, cultivated and highly intelligent person, of the glories and miseries of the practice as are likely ever to read' Literary Review‘Anyone remotely interested in medicine should read this book.bringing us a front-line report from an often alien territory.I hope the judges of the Samuel Johnson Prize are taking note’ Daily Telegraph.