Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor and the author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books. The most recent of these, Breathtaking (2021), was adapted into an acclaimed television series, broadcast on ITV in 2024. It reveals how she and her colleagues confronted the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dear Life (2020), depicting her work in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize. Your Life in My Hands (2017) documents life as a junior doctor. Before going to medical school, Rachel was a broadcast journalist. She produced and directed current affairs documentaries focusing on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Iraq War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She continues to write regularly for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Lancet among others, and appears regularly on television and radio. Inspired by a visit to Ukraine during the conflict in late 2022, Rachel founded a UK-registered charity, Hospice Ukraine, which supports the work of local palliative care teams in Ukraine.
If you're wondering whether to turn the page and read it, my
message is simple: please do
A searing insider's account of being a doctor during the tsunami of
coronavirus deaths . . . It says everything about her character
that Clarke refuses to settle for despair, focusing on the human
decency she has seen
*Independent*
Clarke has written the UK's human story of Covid. Weaving together
stories of patients, families, nurses, doctors and paramedics as
the virus spread from New Year's Day to the end of April 2020. She
reveals the desperate times and the government's mistakes but also
how people from all walks of life - inside the NHS and out - have
tried to reach out and show goodness to one another
*Stylist*
Powerful, uplifting and even reassuring . . . Clarke's tone is more
intimate, much of the book written at night when she couldn't sleep
for fear, fury and frustration - the last two she attributes
largely to the inadequacies and lies of politicians. Rage lurks
beneath many paragraphs as she lambasts the delays in decisions,
and the "number theatre" of statistics. You get the sense of
someone trying to remain calm and reasoned, often on the verge of
being overcome . . . superb
*Guardian*
Clarke may well be up for another award for this disturbing insider
account of the NHS during the pandemic . . . she recognises the
power of individual stories
*Express*
This memoir of the first wave of Covid will, I predict, be read a
century from now as one of the best eyewitness accounts of what
happened in the nation's wards in 2020. But it is no less important
that it be read now, as a riveting, heart-wrenching testimony from
the front line . . . Clarke writes with grace and empathy about her
patients and colleagues . . . A must-read
Clarke is a superb storyteller as well as a clear-eyed polemicist .
. . she writes with such compassion and humanity that you feel you
are in the room . . . Clarke is certainly on the side of the angels
and she has produced much more than a snapshot. Breathtaking is a
beautiful, blistering account of a key moment in our history. If I
were Boris Johnson, I wouldn't want to read it
*Sunday Times*
Her mood on these final pages is sad but proud and grateful at the
way in which the NHS has triumphantly come through the greatest
challenge in seventy years
*Mail on Sunday*
Breathtaking is a scorching corrective to any suggestion that the
pandemic is a hoax and that empty hospital corridors imply deserted
intensive care units . . . Written at pace as "a kind of nocturnal
therapy" on sleepless nights, Clarke's book has all the rawness of
someone still working in the eye of the storm
*Mirror*
It is a terrific read. I approached it with caution, having grown
to dread the daily diet of misery which is life in Covidland.
Instead, I became immersed in an extremely well written book that
at times read like a thriller. If you only read one book about
Covid, make it this one
*The Tablet*
Breathtaking is a visceral account of the pandemic on the front
line. It is about love, fear, honour and above all humanity. It is
also a howl of anger at the lies, deceit and disregard for ordinary
people by those at the top of society
*Irish Times*
Breathtaking weaves interviews with patients, relatives, and
colleagues about the experience of Covid-19, but the book's voltage
is Clarke's eyewitness testimony from the throes of the pandemic.
Rarely is her devastation more affecting than in her belief that
patients in her hospice - society's most vulnerable - are being
betrayed by the government's mishandling of coronavirus and that in
the hierarchy of dying, hospice patients are at the bottom
*Sunday Business Post*
There are a host of first-hand accounts of the pandemic by medics
promised for 2021, but this one, written by a palliative care
doctor who wrote the bestselling Dear Life, sets a high bar
*Sunday Times*
A profound and tear-inducing book . . . a wonderfully written
inside view of the NHS at a time of crisis, with candour and
compassion, humanising a dehumanising situation . . . It is a
remarkable achievement, which other chroniclers of the pandemic
will struggle to match
*The i*
Clarke focuses on the glimmers of hope and innate goodness she was
witness to, even in the most arduous circumstance
*Radio Times*
A book replete with courage and empathy.
*Observer*
'With Breathtaking, the palliative care specialist turns her
attention to Covid, in a raw and unflinching portrayal of life on
the frontline of the pandemic...Deeply humane, Breathtaking is a
book replete with courage, resilience and empathy.'
*Guardian online*
If you're wondering whether to turn the page and read it, my
message is simple: please do
A searing insider's account of being a doctor during the tsunami of
coronavirus deaths . . . It says everything about her character
that Clarke refuses to settle for despair, focusing on the human
decency she has seen
*Independent*
Clarke has written the UK's human story of Covid. Weaving together
stories of patients, families, nurses, doctors and paramedics as
the virus spread from New Year's Day to the end of April 2020. She
reveals the desperate times and the government's mistakes but also
how people from all walks of life - inside the NHS and out - have
tried to reach out and show goodness to one another
*Stylist*
Powerful, uplifting and even reassuring . . . Clarke's tone is more
intimate, much of the book written at night when she couldn't sleep
for fear, fury and frustration - the last two she attributes
largely to the inadequacies and lies of politicians. Rage lurks
beneath many paragraphs as she lambasts the delays in decisions,
and the "number theatre" of statistics. You get the sense of
someone trying to remain calm and reasoned, often on the verge of
being overcome . . . superb
*Guardian*
Clarke may well be up for another award for this disturbing insider
account of the NHS during the pandemic . . . she recognises the
power of individual stories
*Express*
This memoir of the first wave of Covid will, I predict, be read a
century from now as one of the best eyewitness accounts of what
happened in the nation's wards in 2020. But it is no less important
that it be read now, as a riveting, heart-wrenching testimony from
the front line . . . Clarke writes with grace and empathy about her
patients and colleagues . . . A must-read
Clarke is a superb storyteller as well as a clear-eyed polemicist .
. . she writes with such compassion and humanity that you feel you
are in the room . . . Clarke is certainly on the side of the angels
and she has produced much more than a snapshot. Breathtaking is a
beautiful, blistering account of a key moment in our history. If I
were Boris Johnson, I wouldn't want to read it
*Sunday Times*
Her mood on these final pages is sad but proud and grateful at the
way in which the NHS has triumphantly come through the greatest
challenge in seventy years
*Mail on Sunday*
Breathtaking is a scorching corrective to any suggestion that the
pandemic is a hoax and that empty hospital corridors imply deserted
intensive care units . . . Written at pace as "a kind of nocturnal
therapy" on sleepless nights, Clarke's book has all the rawness of
someone still working in the eye of the storm
*Mirror*
It is a terrific read. I approached it with caution, having grown
to dread the daily diet of misery which is life in Covidland.
Instead, I became immersed in an extremely well written book that
at times read like a thriller. If you only read one book about
Covid, make it this one
*The Tablet*
Breathtaking is a visceral account of the pandemic on the front
line. It is about love, fear, honour and above all humanity. It is
also a howl of anger at the lies, deceit and disregard for ordinary
people by those at the top of society
*Irish Times*
Breathtaking weaves interviews with patients, relatives, and
colleagues about the experience of Covid-19, but the book's voltage
is Clarke's eyewitness testimony from the throes of the pandemic.
Rarely is her devastation more affecting than in her belief that
patients in her hospice - society's most vulnerable - are being
betrayed by the government's mishandling of coronavirus and that in
the hierarchy of dying, hospice patients are at the bottom
*Sunday Business Post*
There are a host of first-hand accounts of the pandemic by medics
promised for 2021, but this one, written by a palliative care
doctor who wrote the bestselling Dear Life, sets a high bar
*Sunday Times*
A profound and tear-inducing book . . . a wonderfully written
inside view of the NHS at a time of crisis, with candour and
compassion, humanising a dehumanising situation . . . It is a
remarkable achievement, which other chroniclers of the pandemic
will struggle to match
*The i*
Clarke focuses on the glimmers of hope and innate goodness she was
witness to, even in the most arduous circumstance
*Radio Times*
A book replete with courage and empathy.
*Observer*
'With Breathtaking, the palliative care specialist turns her
attention to Covid, in a raw and unflinching portrayal of life on
the frontline of the pandemic...Deeply humane, Breathtaking is a
book replete with courage, resilience and empathy.'
*Guardian online*
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