Direct Red

Direct Red

A Surgeon's Story

Summary

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 as a surgeon on the NHS frontlines; a woman in a world dominated by male egos. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary 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.

'Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery' The Times

'Brave and uncomfortable' Guardian

Reviews

  • Hard to imagine a better book, or a more original one...writes at least as well as many good novelists...funny, and honest, and beautifully done
    Claire Tomalin

About the author

Gabriel Weston

Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She studied English at Edinburgh University before attending medical school in London, graduating as a doctor in 2000 and becoming a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. Her Sunday Times bestselling debut, Direct Red, was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and won the PEN Ackerley Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of a novel Dirty Work, which won the McKitterick Prize and presented the BBC medical series Trust Me, I’m a Doctor and Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook. She now works as a part-time ENT surgeon and lives in London with her husband and children.
Learn More

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more