“The feel of breath on the fine, peach-skin hairs of my cheek would tell me if this person were still living; sometimes the last breaths come so slow, the only way of catching them is to come in cheek-close and wait for the feel of them.” As a teenager, Molly Case underwent an operation that saved her life. Nearly a decade later, she finds herself in the operating room again—this tim...
January 26th 2021
“I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of the living. We are never so wise as when we live in the moment.” At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung can...
January 26th 2021
"My message is that we'll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. Yet I am one of the lucky ones. People are suffering." 'Everything needs to change. And it has to start today' In A...
January 26th 2021
“Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.” Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon, the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him the bitter neighbour from h...
January 26th 2021
"Every idiot who goes around with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Charles Dickens's tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, who is haunted by three spirits and learns the true meaning of Christmas has had, along with Dickens's other Christmas writings, a lasting and significant influence upon our ideas ab...
January 26th 2021
“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?” When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails, social media, and finances with their unive...
January 26th 2021
“You know, those men: bike riding, knitted sweater? Pretends Facebook isn’t important to him, but it really is?” I was met with a blank stare, so carried on. “Craft beer, start-ups, sense of entitlement? Reads books by Alain de Botton, needs a girlfriend who doesn’t threaten his mediocrity?” Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling tw...
January 26th 2021
“By managing to stifle his horror at the charred flesh and looming demise of two young men, by keeping close at their bedsides, by ensuring they knew they were not alone, perhaps he had helped make an intolerable fate bearable. Perhaps he had done everything that mattered.” As a specialist in palliative medicine, Dr Rachel Clarke chooses to inhabit a place many people would find too t...
January 21st 2021
“If we on one particular day feel up to it we can challenge our own chatter and dare ourselves to do something different” From Sunday Times bestselling author Fearne Cotton, this is the handbook for modern life we all need. Including expert advice, ideas to put into practice, adventures to complete and interviews with everyone from Bryony Gordon to Billie Piper, Quiet seeks out ways t...
January 21st 2021
“Is the practice of medicine a business or is it a vocation? Where does the balance lie between doing well and doing good?” For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world's most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held ...
January 20th 2021
