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I've got a cracking episode coming up for you today. I'm delighted to be joined by Joe Thomas, a hospitalist, from Buffalo in New York to talk about the Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. I loved Abraham Verghese first novel Cutting for Stone more than I can begin to tell you and it's a book that's got a special place in my heart because it was the first book that we read as part of the medical humanities book club and which I set up twelve years ago and which is still running. I knew that Abraham Verghese had a new book out and I sensed it was going to be an absolute cracker but I hadn't got around to reading it and then I had an email from Joe asking had I read it yet and please could he come on and talk about it because he was thinking about it so much. This is a book set in India in the early twentieth century, taking us up through until the later twentieth Century. There's quite a lot of medicine in the book. Really credible medicine because Abraham Verghese is a wonderful novelist and he's also a doctor. So you don't need to get irritated by the medicine being wrong. There are themes around family, around education, about history, secrets, support, communities, intersectionality, medical negligence the end of an empire. Oh my goodness there is so much in this book and if you pick it up and you think "gosh it's very long", it flies by because it is absolutely absorbing. I loved it so much and I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed talking to Joe today about it.

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Today's episode is all about a very short and very powerful novel by Max Porter, Shy. In 122 pages Max Porter inhabits the mind of a very troubled teenage boy called Shy. Nicola Ennis, my guest, and I both have quite significant life experiences of working with children and young people think that this is probably the best insight into the mind of a troubled teenage boy that you could possibly wish to have. It is quite dark. It's also funny. It's just an incredible insight and I think there is so much to talk about in terms of how we respond to young people how we respond to young people in distress and what it takes to remain. The grown-up in a situation where a distressed young person is behaving in a way that you wish they weren't and to be honest, they wish they weren't too I really hope you're going to enjoy our conversation today.

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A warm welcome back to a previous guest today. It's a real joy to be talking to Professor Ellie Hothersall-Davis from the University of Dundee. We have come up with today six books which we think would be really, really good as reading material before starting a medical degree.

Maybe people listening who have got children or godchildren or nieces or nephews or next door neighbours who are planning to become doctors. Arguably actually perhaps becoming any sort of healthcare professional because I think the themes for all of these books are translatable across healthcare and Ellie and I wanted to think about what we could suggest to people to be reading that aren't textbooks that will give them enjoyment and escapism and help them to promote empathy, to think about things from another perspective, to lose themselves in a book whilst also being able to think more deeply about something they might never previously have considered. We've got six cracking books coming up today and I really hope that you are going to enjoy thinking about them.

The books we discussed:

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Cure for Good Intentions by Sophie Harrison
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

We also briefly mentioned the Beekeeper of Alleppo

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A warm welcome back today to Victoria Kinkaid who's here to talk about Clytemnestra's bind by Susan C Wilson. This is a modern retelling of a story from Greek mythology that of Queen Clytemenestra , unwilling wife of Agamemnon. I really enjoyed my conversation with Victoria. If you've not come across her before he has been on the podcast before and she was here last year talking about a brilliant nonfiction title Half the Sky. Today we are talking fiction. We are talking Greek Mythology, we are talking about feminism, we are talking about the role of women in health care, we're talking about domestic abuse, we're talking about trauma and PTSD We talk about people pleasers, we talk about boundaries, we talk about so many things. It is a really really good book even for somebody like me who doesn't much like Greek mythology.

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It's a warm welcome back today to Lizz Lidbury who joins me to talk about The Seven Imperfect Rules of Elvira Carr. This is such an accessible brilliant book. It's described in a lot of reviews as being for people who loved Eleanor Oliphant and I admit I did love Eleanor Oliphant but I'm not convinced that it is so similar to Eleanor Oliphant to need to be pigeonholed in that way.

Lizz and I have had a really enjoyable time talking about it thinking about the characters some of the wonderful cast within the book. We thought about the difference between listening to an audiobook when the characters have particular voices or are portrayed in particular ways by the narrator. We talk about social isolation. We talk about scaffolding young people. We talk about hopes and aspirations and about biscuits.

We also mentioned our love of this facebook Medics book group https://www.facebook.com/groups/135276503690822

We recommend the charity Autistic Girls Network which is a wonderful charity and maybe just like the one Elvira finds support from online https://autisticgirlsnetwork.org/

We talked about the recent meta-analysis of the power of reading fiction to improve empathy which can be found here
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/105137/1/AcceptedManuscript_260224.pdf

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It's a welcome back for my guest this week! I'm delighted to have Jo Maher GP and active travel enthusiast from Sheffield one the podcast to talk about Selena Goddon's fabulous collection Pessimism is for Lightweights. Jo and I had a great conversation about how much we love these poems. We talk about activism. We talk about the tension that there sometimes is as a healthcare professional around "are we allowed to be activists" (the answer to that question is very definitely Yes) we talk about whether it is better to seek forgiveness than permission. We talk about using humour. We talk about agency. Talk about the frustrations of the world that we both currently live and practice in and how quiet activism might be the way forwards for people as they are building up their courage muscles.

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Joining me today on the podcast is forensic psychiatrist Gill Patterson and we are talking about The Panopticon by Jenny Fagan. This is an absolutely brilliant book which I read in a day on holiday. There are many themes which are quite dark, quite thought provoking and I think Anais, the central character, will stay with me for a very very long time.

Gill and I talk about forensic services, especially forensic services for women. We talk about adverse life experiences we talk about normal responses to abnormal situations, we talk about the care system, we talk about connecting with young people and about seeing people holistically as their three dimensional selves. The Panopticon is a brilliant brilliant novel which I would really really recommend that you read and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Gill about it today.