Direct Red

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

Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery

The Times

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

This slender, elegantly written memoir by a female surgeon, Gabriel Weston, is a fascinating, no holds barred account of life in the operating theatre

Independent

Through this insightful book, Weston succeeds superbly in communicating the fascinating brutal reality of a surgeon's life

Ian Critchley, Daily Telegraph

Gabriel Weston's story succeeds better than any I have known...more riveting and thought-provoking than any fiction

The Lady, Susan Hill

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

Victoria Segal, The Guardian

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

Elizabeth Day, Observer

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times

This book is mesmerising

William Leith, Scotsman

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 description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

Rachel Cusk