Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery - Softcover

Sensational...Marsh is curmudgeonly, unflinching, clinical, competitive, often contemptuous and consistently curious. In Admissions he scrubs up just as well the second time around and continues to revel in his joyous candour (THE SUNDAY TIMES)

Superb...a eulogy to surgery and a study of living. I didn't want this book to end. Henry Marsh is part of a growing canon of superb modern medical writers...whose storytelling and prose are transportative...His timing is also impeccable...His sentences, too, feel like works of the finest craftmanship, made with the love that goes into both his woodwork and surgery (Jessamy Calkin DAILY TELEGRAPH)

Marsh is, given his profession, a surprisingly emotional man, likably so. His account of his younger self that threads through this compulsive book is a Bildungsroman in itself. He is also a fine writer and storyteller, and a nuanced observer (Tim Adams OBSERVER)

The maverick is back, even more blunt and irascible, with tales of thrilling, high-wire operations at medicine's unconquered frontier, woven through with personal memoir...Marsh in full spate is quite magnificent...a master of tar-black, deadpan humour (Melanie Reid THE TIMES)

Disarmingly frank storytelling. [Marsh] is, in spite of himself, hugely likeable...his reflections on death and dying equal those in Atul Gawande's excellent Being Mortal (ECONOMIST)

Epigramatically balanced and almost brutally candid...Admissions offers a reprise of many of [Do No Harm's] virtues, from the elegance of the writing to the undiminished sense of wonder at the complexity of the brain (Tom Sutcliffe MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Admissions is a humbling read, in which neurosurgeon Henry Marsh shares fascinating facts learnt during his 40-year career as a brain surgeon. He has a deep humanity that resonates throughout (GOOD HOUSEKEEPING)

Transgressive, wry and confessional, sporadically joyful and occasionally doleful. It is in many ways a more revealing work than Do No Harm, and the revelations it offers are a good deal more personal...Marsh skilfully articulates the subtleties and frustrations of neurosurgery - but there is a deeper examination of death, and an angrier exposition of the shameful betrayal of the NHS by successive generations of politicians...honesty is abundantly apparent here - a quality as rare and commendable in elite surgeons as one suspects it is in memoirists...elegaic but consistently entertaining (Gavin Francis GUARDIAN)

An enthralling book, unputdownable...it is an exhilarating, even thrilling read, a glimpse into a world we hope we may never have to enter (THE ARTS DESK)

Fascinating...Marsh paints a vivid picture of the pressures imposed on a surgeon who is quite literally at the cutting edge of modern medicine (William Hartston DAILY EXPRESS)

A provocative and heartfelt new book from the brain surgeon and bestselling author of DO NO HARM