Vintage, 3 January 2019 (4th ed)

 
Pb, 352pp.
 
 
Nurse Christie Watson looks back over a career offering vital compassion at the fringes of experience, doing what must be done in relation to human life at its most vital and its most tragic.
 
 
If it's taken a very long time to get a memoir written by a nurse, then it was certainly worth the wait. I have rarely read anything that has moved me as much or taken me by the hand so confidently into an unknown world, teeming with life and haunted by death... A remarkable book that I will be pressing on everyone I love -- Allison Pearson, The Sunday Telegraph

A powerful insight into the life of nurses -- Robbie Millen, The Times, **Books of the Year**

It made me cry. It made me think. It made me laugh. It encouraged me to appreciate this most underappreciated of professions more than ever ... A gently remarkable book… it’s a privilege to have Christie as our guide -- Adam Kay, Guardian

Wonderful -- Sebastian Faulks

A deeply compassionate book… It will leave you weeping as well as hopeful -- Helen Davies, Sunday Times, **Books of the Year**

An amazing book -- terrifying at times, but tender and truthful. Let's be thankful for wonderful nurses -- and writers -- like Christie Watson -- Jacqueline Wilson

Compared with the recent rash of doctor memoirs, this is a far quieter and more thoughtful book -- Kathryn Hughes, Guardian, **Books of the Year**
 
 
Biography
 
 
Christie Watson was a registered nurse for twenty years. Her first novel, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away, won the Costa First Novel Award and the Waverton Good Read Award, and she was named as Red Magazine's Hot Woman of the Year (Creative). Where Women Are Kings, her second novel, was also published to international critical acclaim, and her works have been translated into twenty-three languages. Christie has recently won a Future Shapers Award from Marie Claire for nursing activism, and awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters, honoris causa for her contribution to nursing and the arts by the University of East Anglia. She is patron of the Royal College of Nursing Foundation.  Christie Watson has joined the Covid-19 emergency nursing register and is going back into the NHS.