Thrilled to be appearing at Stroud Book Festival on Thurs 9 November alongside Penny Morland, whose excellent ‘A Fortunate Woman’ is a revisitation of the 1967 John Berger classic about a rural English GP, ‘A Fortunate Man’. We’ll be discussing what’s happening with general practice, and why it’s vital – for patients, doctors, and the sustainability of the health service – to restore general practice to its central place at the heart of the NHS.

Delighted to announce I’ll be appearing at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Sunday 19 November alongside Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator and author of ‘Fighting for Life: Twelve Battles that Made Our NHS, and the Struggle for Its Future’. We’ll be discussing the minor issue of how to fix the NHS. Tickets are on sale now. The event starts at 6pm. We might be there a while.

Thrilled to announce that I’ll be appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Wednesday 24 August.

The event gets underway at 11.45 and I’ll be discussing my recent publication, ‘What Is a Doctor?’, and the future of the NHS with fellow authors Penny Morland and Dr Annabel Sowemimo. Sarah Brown will be chairing and keeping us all generally on point.

You can buy tickets here.

It’s here! Chicken Unga Fever, a collection of the best of my ‘Health Matters’ columns, which have appeared fortnightly for the past five years in the New Statesman. Just in time for Christmas, too. How lovely.

Thrilled to mark the official publication day for my sixth novel You – the blurb on the cover starts: ‘A man boards a train, hoping to see the daughter he’s heard nothing from for seven years.’

Many thanks to my fantastic publishers, the mighty Salt Publishing, who have turned my words into a very fine book indeed. Here’s the final cover of the first edition:

Delighted to publish the cover for my sixth novel, You, which will be published by the mighty Salt on 15th April 2018

I’m delighted to announce that my sixth novel, You, will be published by the mighty Salt in April 2018. More details, including cover art work and a taster of the story, will appear here later in the year.

Just when you think there will be no more reviews to come (actually, if I’m honest, months after I thought there’d be no more reviews to come), this little beauty appears in the New Statesman – ‘a fast-paced missing-person investigation that explores the complexities of sisterly strife on a vividly human scale.’

It’s never too late for a review to appear, it would seem … this nice mention appeared in the Catholic Herald, no less!

The best corrective to a disappointing paucity of coverage in the ever-contracting mainstream books pages is to read reactions from real readers. The latest 5 star review on Amazon is such a cracker that I’m reproducing it here in full. Thank you, Mr A Skinner of London!

‘I am astonished that this highly intelligent and beautifully written book has not achieved a much higher profile, and critical acclaim. It has a great deal to say about life, love and relationships, but says it in a quiet, unshouty, reasonable way. I was also astonished that it was written by a man. This is essentially a story about two complex and intelligent women, and, to my masculine ear at least, sounds true in every word. I would be very interested to hear the female perspective of the writing and the characters.
I only discovered it by accident, lurking quietly in a pre-Christmas interview with book publishers, about which books they wished they had published in 2016. It deserves a very wide audience, and I have been recommending it to all my friends, who have any interest in quality literature.’