LEIGH FORBES: Books of all Sorts

This is Going to Hurt

by Adam Kay.

Adam Kay is a junior doctor in the UK’s National Health Service. (“Junior” in this context means highly qualified, but overworked and underpaid.) Anyone who has followed the news in recent years will know that junior doctors have been making a bit of a noise (in a typically understated British way) about their pay and working conditions; and so they should. Kay’s exposé of what life is actually like – as the only doctor on the wards at 3am, trying to save three lives at once – really does hurt.

Kay doesn’t write from a political point of view – but from the heart of a man trying to do his very best under extremely difficult conditions (and whose personal life suffers greatly as a result). This book should be read by everyone who has a vote, because I honestly don’t think anyone would vote for this. (And yet many did.)

This book made me laugh, a lot, but it also made me cry, and his final story still haunts me, a month after I finished it.

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