Send us a text 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 more about the book, here's what the publisher's say: "In this extraordinary memoir, a father tells the s...
Send us a text 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 at books, thinking about books, and drinking cups of tea and eating cake in this absolute gem of a place. I...
Send us a text Medication, Mental Illness and Murder. What Really Killed the Crespi Twins? sounds 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 story about father who was significantly unwell, who was struggling with side effects from medication and who took...
Send us a text 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 book, which has already been recommended to a huge number of my patients and my colleagues with very good effect...
Send us a text 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 Brotherless Night, have really, really stayed with me. This is an absolutely phenomenal novel. I cannot recommend ...
Send us a text 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 incr...
Send us a text 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 leadership means for them in a really practical sense of how they have done the things that they've done. It ...
Send us a text 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 on holiday with you, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the absolutely compelling and co...
Send us a text 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 perhaps have succumbed to the overwhelming fatigue and general malaise that she was suffering from. She expl...
Send us a text 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 Big by Tara Mohr. This is a really accessible leadership book, thinking about why women often "play small", why they don't n...
Send us a text 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's magic realism, though Joe's decided that he'd quite like to invent a completely new genre, which is called magical re...
Send us a text It'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 perspective...
Send us a text A 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, ...
Send us a text I'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...
Send us a text A very warm welcome today to midwife and educator Suzanne Crozier. We are talking about a book called The Midwife by Tricia Cresswell, which is an absolutely brilliant historical fiction novel, which Suzanne and I both enjoyed enormously for some similar and some different reasons. The Midwife is set in rural Northumberland and in Victorian London. And it's one of those brilliant books with dual narratives, with two wonderful protagonists. It keeps you guessing, and makes yo...
Send us a text I'm really pleased today to be welcoming Georgia Vine to Bedside Reading. Georgia is an OT and is the author of Occupational Therapy, Disability Activism and Me, Challenging Ableism in Healthcare, which is a bit of a mouthful of a title for a very slim and absolutely brilliant, brilliant book. Georgia is an OT, she is an educator at the University of Huddersfield and she also is disabled. She has cerebral palsy and this book is based on her own experiences through the educat...
Send us a text I'm here today with Laura Spells to talk about a book called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. And we are thinking about Gen Z in particular and the generation behind that, the younger children. We're thinking about smartphone use. We're thinking about the effect that phones and social media have on developing brains. The move that has happened in the world from play-based to a phone-based childhood and what we're losing in that and what we're gaining in terms of anxie...
Send us a text Welcome to season 10 of Bedside Reading and what a series I've got lined up for you this time around! I am delighted to be launching today with two very special guests, Debbie Hicks and Gemma Jolly from The Reading Agency. The Reading Agency is an absolutely wonderful charity and their Reading Well "Books on Prescription" scheme is absolutely fantastic. If you don't know about it already, there's plenty in the show notes to tell you about it and we will be talking about it du...
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Send us a text Nina Donovan's brilliant poem Nasty Woman moves me so much every time I hear it, or read it. It's such a joy to welcome Charley to the podcast here Listen to Nina perform her poem here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvN0On85sNQ