Dirty Work

A powerful, gripping novel that confronts one of the great contemporary taboos head-on. By the author of the brilliant Direct Red.

A lot of novels are called “brave”, and they aren’t.  This one is.

A brilliantly intense, thought-provoking story

Gripping, well-researched and elegantly written

This courageous and interesting author is that unusual thing, a contemporary moralist

Bold, brave, and uncomfortable… it's a gripping read

The subject matter is brave, the moral perspective complex, the writing vivid

Weston has an unwavering passion for the truth as well as the courage to tell it.

Weston excels at writing about medicine precisely…but with great subtlety of tone that allows readers to appreciate the human faultlines that lie beneath conventional portraits of doctoring.

Weston is a superb writer of lucid and evocative prose… This is not a dark book so much as a deeply thoughtful one

Few writers capture the mentality of surgery as incisively as Ms Weston has managed to. Her experiences in hospitals are palpable on the page.

Will certainly raise questions for further thought by the reader even after putting the book down.

The subject matter is brave and necessary… Weston is a superb writer of lucid and evocative prose… This is not a dark book so much as a deeply thoughtful one. I would make it obligatory for the medical curriculum.

Gripping, well-researched and elegantly written – but definitely not for the squeamish.

Weston’s fast-paced novel raises questions of integrity, morality and medical ethics.

Dirty Work is a fascinating, thought-provoking and at times deeply troubling tale. Weston presents a balanced and brutally honest portrayal of a difficult theme.

Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She qualified as a doctor in 2000 and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. Her first book, Direct Red, was published in 2009. It was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. She lives in London and continues to practise as a part-time ENT surgeon.

Winner of the McKitterick Prize 
 
 
 
Two women in a room. 
 
‘Courageous’ Rachel Cusk, Guardian 
 
One is dying. 
 
‘Gripping’ Observer 
 
The other just sits back and watches. 
 
‘Necessary’ Independent 
 
For both, there is everything to lose. 
 
Surgeons are meant to save lives, but Nancy is a special kind of surgeon. When she makes a mistake in the operating theatre she is summoned to explain herself to a tribunal and is forced to consider what it means to be a doctor who has killed as well as cured. And to realise that her own redemption can only come through telling a tale that nobody wants to hear. 
 
Gabriel Weston, author of the acclaimed Direct Red: A Surgeon’s Story, winner of the 2010 PEN/Ackerley Prize, has written an extraordinarily moving and powerful novel.

A Surgeon's Story

Direct Red

A rare, original and humane book about the world of doctors that will shock you, move you and stay with you long after the last page.

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? 
 
What is it like to cut into someone else's body? 
 
What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? 
 
How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? 
 
 Gabriel Weston worked as a surgeon on the NHS frontlines; a woman in a world dominated by male egos. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse. 
 
 'Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery' The Times 
 
'Brave and uncomfortable' Guardian

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

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

A beautiful, haunting and upsetting book. Weston's prose is cool and elegant

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

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

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

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

This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory.

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

A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gabriel Weston was born in 1970. She went to Edinburgh University to read English and from there to medical school in London. She graduated as a doctor in 2000 and became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. She now works as a part-time ENT surgeon. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? 
 
Gabriel Weston worked as a surgeon in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse. 
 
Direct Red won the 2010 PEN/ Ackerley Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2009.

Gabriel Weston

An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy she redefines the genre. ALIVE is a tour of human life and bodies, but she also brings her own body, in the context of her own life, into an absolutely compelling narrative; sex, pregnancy, asylum seekers, breast implants and hearts – especially the author's own heart, in every sense. It is essential reading if you own a body and should be mandatory for all those who study them.

Chris van Tulleken, author of ULTRA PROCESSED PEOPLE

As Gabriel Weston demonstrates in this remarkable book, each organ of our body is a miracle of evolutionary imagination, performing tasks that are outlandishly creative and brilliant. An unusually compelling and illuminating book.

An Alternative Anatomy

A profound and provocative journey through the human body from the award-winning writer, broadcaster and surgeon. 
 
What does it mean to live in a body? 
 
For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn't help us navigate the reality of living in one. As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Weston found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience. 
 
In this captivating exploration of the body, Weston dissolves the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are. Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives, a fuller and more human picture of our bodies emerges: more fragile, frightening and miraculous than we could have imagined. 
 
Intimate, penetrating and original, Alive is an anatomy like no other, about our bodies and bonds, the richness and brevity of existence, and the thread of mortality that connect us all.

Gabriel Weston

Praise for Alive

An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy she redefines the genre. ALIVE is a tour of human life and ...

Beguiling and sophisticated

As Gabriel Weston demonstrates in this remarkable book, each organ of our body is a miracle of evolutionary imagination, performing tasks that are outlandishly creative and brilliant. An unusually compelling and ...

An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy she redefines the genre. ALIVE is a tour of human life and ...

Beguiling and sophisticated

As Gabriel Weston demonstrates in this remarkable book, each organ of our body is a miracle of evolutionary imagination, performing tasks that are outlandishly creative and brilliant. An unusually compelling and ...

An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy she redefines the genre. ALIVE is a tour of human life and ...

Beguiling and sophisticated

As Gabriel Weston demonstrates in this remarkable book, each organ of our body is a miracle of evolutionary imagination, performing tasks that are outlandishly creative and brilliant. An unusually compelling and ...

Books by Gabriel Weston

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