Its galloping pace and breathless immediacy feel deeply, even scarily, authentic.
Rest and Be Thankful conveys all the drama, dread, stress and (sometimes) blissful relief of a working life spent in intensive paediatric care. Remarkably, Emma Glass herself still combines nursing with writing. But the long-overdue respect now accorded to their calling has helped to grow their numbers, with Christie Watson and Nathan Filer two best-selling British authors who have lately moved from the wards to the shelves. Historically, nurse-writers have been a much rarer breed. Doctors have written honoured literature since ancient times and the modern ranks of medically qualified story-tellers stretch from Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov all the way to Adam Kay and Jed ( Line of Duty, Bodyguard) Mercurio.
Whereas her debut burrowed ferociously, but lyrically, into the aftermath of a horrific attack on its young narrator, this second novel unfolds in the professional milieu she knows, and in the driven, haunted minds of the people who sustain it.
And no department of hospital medicine hosts a front-line denser in anguish, terror and last-ditch hope than the paediatric unit.Įmma Glass is a richly gifted young novelist – already the author, in 2018, of Peach – who also works as a children’s nurse in London. Even in more normal times, however, front-line treatment may throw crisis after crisis at staff forever just one tough shift away from utter exhaustion of body and spirit alike. Today’s pandemic means that the psychology of medical emergencies now gets to affect (almost) everyone. Suddenly, we have plunged into a period when hospitals become battle zones, with their personnel seen as shock troops enlisted to resist an all-pervading enemy.
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