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 Tomalin
Her 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 *