Direct Red

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 TomalinHer wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing… Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery * The Times *A beautiful, haunting and upsetting book. Weston’s prose is cool and elegant * Sunday Telegraph *Direct Red is Gabriel Weston’s memoir of the years she spent pursuing a surgical career… She examines these with an honesty that is both brave and uncomfortable * Guardian *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. She leaves you feeling that if push came to shove you’d want to be operated on by her – Nicholas Shakespeare * Daily Telegraph *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 *Concise, literate, truthful and often moving… 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 *This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory. * Daily Telegraph Summer Reads *The practice of medicine is a way of living: vivid and engrossing, it stimulates senses physical and metaphysical…It is a rare skill for a doctor to be able to communicate this rich sensorium in writing. It is a delight to read the words of one who does it so well * The Economist *A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre – Christopher Hart * Sunday Times *

Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She went to Edinburgh University to read English and from there to medical school in London. She graduated as a doctor in 2000 and became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. She now works as a part-time ENT surgeon. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

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