What do you think?
Rate this book
Breathtaking
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERNOW A MAJOR TV DRAMA'The next Mr Bates v the Post Office poised to shake up Britain' Big Issue'If you're wondering whether to turn the page and read it, my message is please do' Michael Rosen'A book replete with courage and empathy' ObserverHow does it feel to confront a pandemic from the inside, one patient at a time? To bridge the gulf between a perilously unwell patient in quarantine and their distraught family outside? To be uncertain whether the protective equipment you wear fits the science or the size of the government stockpile? To strive your utmost to maintain your humanity even while barricaded behind visors and masks?Rachel is a palliative care doctor who looked after the most gravely unwell patients on the Covid-19 wards of her hospital. Amid the tensions, fatigue and rising death toll, she witnessed the courage of patients and NHS staff alike in conditions of unprecedented adversity. For all the bleakness and fear, she found that moments that could stop you in your tracks abounded. People who rose to their best, upon facing the worst, as a microbe laid waste to the population.With a new introduction from Michael Rosen
216 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 28, 2021
149 people are currently reading
1969 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 164 reviews
January 30, 2021
Clarke is a palliative care doctor based in Oxfordshire. She runs the Katharine House hospice but during the coronavirus pandemic has also been on active duty in the Oxford University Hospitals system. If you’re on social media you have likely come across some of her postings as she has been equally vocal in her praise of the NHS and her criticism of Boris Johnson’s faltering policies, which are often of the too little, too late variety. So I was eager to read her insider’s account of hospital treatment of the first wave of Covid in the UK, especially because her previous book, Dear Life, was one of my top two nonfiction releases of last year.
The focus is on the first four full months of 2020, and the book originated in Clarke’s insomniac diaries and notes made when, even after manically busy shifts, she couldn’t rest her thoughts. Her pilot husband was flying to China even as increasingly alarming reports started coming in from Wuhan. She weaves in the latest news from China and Italy as well as what she hears from colleagues and disease experts in London. But the priority is given to stories: of the first doctor to die in China; of a Yorkshire ICU nurse’s father, who comes down with Covid and is on a ventilator in an Oxford hospital; and of her patients there and in the hospice. She is touched that so many are making great sacrifices, such as by deciding not to visit loved ones at the end of their lives so as not to risk spreading infection.
A shortage of PPE remained a major issue, though Dominic Pimenta (whose Duty of Care was my first COVID-19 book) pulled through for her with an emergency shipment for the hospice – without which it would have had to close. Clarke marvels at the NHS’s ability to create an extra 33,000 beds within a month, but knows that this comes at a cost of other services, including cancer care, being stripped back or cancelled, meaning that many are not receiving the necessary treatment or are pushing inescapable problems further down the road.
A comparison with Gavin Francis’s Intensive Care, published earlier in the month, is inevitable. Both doctors bounce between headlines and everyday stories, government advice and the situation on the ground. Both had their own Covid scare – Clarke didn’t meet the criteria to be tested so simply went back to work two weeks later, when she felt well enough – and had connections to regions that foreshadowed what would soon happen in the UK. Both give a sense of the scope of the crisis and both lament that, just when patients need compassion most, full PPE leads to their doctors feeling more detached from them than ever.
However, within the same page count, Francis manages to convey more of the science behind the virus and its transmission, and helpfully explores the range of effects Covid is having for different groups. He also brings the story more up to the minute with a look back from November, whereas Clarke ends in April and follows up with an epilogue set in August. A book has to end somewhere, yes, but with this crisis ongoing, the later and more relevant its contents can be, the better. And in any book that involves a lot of death, mawkishness is a risk; Clarke so carefully avoided this in Dear Life, but sometimes succumbs here, with an insistence on how the pandemic has brought out the best in people (clapping and rainbows and all that). Her writing is as strong as ever, but I would have appreciated a sharper, more sombre look at the situation a few months later. Perhaps there will be a sequel.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
The focus is on the first four full months of 2020, and the book originated in Clarke’s insomniac diaries and notes made when, even after manically busy shifts, she couldn’t rest her thoughts. Her pilot husband was flying to China even as increasingly alarming reports started coming in from Wuhan. She weaves in the latest news from China and Italy as well as what she hears from colleagues and disease experts in London. But the priority is given to stories: of the first doctor to die in China; of a Yorkshire ICU nurse’s father, who comes down with Covid and is on a ventilator in an Oxford hospital; and of her patients there and in the hospice. She is touched that so many are making great sacrifices, such as by deciding not to visit loved ones at the end of their lives so as not to risk spreading infection.
A shortage of PPE remained a major issue, though Dominic Pimenta (whose Duty of Care was my first COVID-19 book) pulled through for her with an emergency shipment for the hospice – without which it would have had to close. Clarke marvels at the NHS’s ability to create an extra 33,000 beds within a month, but knows that this comes at a cost of other services, including cancer care, being stripped back or cancelled, meaning that many are not receiving the necessary treatment or are pushing inescapable problems further down the road.
A comparison with Gavin Francis’s Intensive Care, published earlier in the month, is inevitable. Both doctors bounce between headlines and everyday stories, government advice and the situation on the ground. Both had their own Covid scare – Clarke didn’t meet the criteria to be tested so simply went back to work two weeks later, when she felt well enough – and had connections to regions that foreshadowed what would soon happen in the UK. Both give a sense of the scope of the crisis and both lament that, just when patients need compassion most, full PPE leads to their doctors feeling more detached from them than ever.
However, within the same page count, Francis manages to convey more of the science behind the virus and its transmission, and helpfully explores the range of effects Covid is having for different groups. He also brings the story more up to the minute with a look back from November, whereas Clarke ends in April and follows up with an epilogue set in August. A book has to end somewhere, yes, but with this crisis ongoing, the later and more relevant its contents can be, the better. And in any book that involves a lot of death, mawkishness is a risk; Clarke so carefully avoided this in Dear Life, but sometimes succumbs here, with an insistence on how the pandemic has brought out the best in people (clapping and rainbows and all that). Her writing is as strong as ever, but I would have appreciated a sharper, more sombre look at the situation a few months later. Perhaps there will be a sequel.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
February 2, 2021
I must be careful in evaluating BREATHTAKING. The words I choose to use should not include extremities of language and over the top evaluations such as those used by football commentators and Tory politicians. I would start by saying:
This is a very good book indeed
Everyone should read it.
Doctor Clarke recounts her experiences during the first four months of the pandemic in the United Kingdom and her reaction to those experiences. She found it difficult to sleep such was her rage at the incompetence that she was experiencing day to day at work, all of this caused by a government failure to aggressively tackle the pandemic. Our NHS did a magnificent job in the most challenging of circumstances and this shines through the book.
I shudder to think what she would make of the current situation with the numbers of deaths and cases rising days by day until the current lockdown began to take effect.
Breathtaking is exceptionally written, using straightforward language and making point after point without repeat.
Everyone should read it.
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen, Two Families at War and The Summer of '39, all published by Sacristy Press.
This is a very good book indeed
Everyone should read it.
Doctor Clarke recounts her experiences during the first four months of the pandemic in the United Kingdom and her reaction to those experiences. She found it difficult to sleep such was her rage at the incompetence that she was experiencing day to day at work, all of this caused by a government failure to aggressively tackle the pandemic. Our NHS did a magnificent job in the most challenging of circumstances and this shines through the book.
I shudder to think what she would make of the current situation with the numbers of deaths and cases rising days by day until the current lockdown began to take effect.
Breathtaking is exceptionally written, using straightforward language and making point after point without repeat.
Everyone should read it.
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen, Two Families at War and The Summer of '39, all published by Sacristy Press.
April 29, 2021
Very hard to read when we’re really still in the thick of it. Full review soon
May 17, 2021
This is an extraordinary book laying bare the realities of what it was like within the NHS in the first wave of the pandemic. It should be compulsory reading for anyone still labouring under the misapprehension that our government have handled COVID-19 well, or that they've "done their best". Knowing that the situation only worsened after the book was finished is devastating.
May 26, 2021
A raw, honest and much-needed narrative based on the author’s personal experiences and encounters with her fellow NHS colleagues, patients and the families bereaved of their loved ones during the first months of the COVID-pandemic. The narrative may most certainly be considered therapeutic in the sense that you, the reader, will in one way or another relate to the author’s reflections. The book is informed by news reports (UK and abroad), statistics and newly published scientific research articles. An especially powerful read when listening to the audiobook (read by the author herself).
June 22, 2021
What a compassionate response to an intensely challenging situation. Rachel Clarke is a palliative care specialist who believes passionately in kindness and humanity in medicine, and she's translated those attributes into the world of the pandemic. Her own personal need to vent through the diary she kept highlights the personal toll this experience has exacted. She pays tribute to so many people, but government officials and scientists would do well to heed her clear-eyed focus on where things were badly managed. Clinicians on the hospital floors had a grandstand view.
December 26, 2022
This is a hard book to review. How can I possibly critique a doctor's account of the first wave of the pandemic, written over the summer of 2020? My first reaction is simply sheer incredulity that she managed to produce something so articulate and beautifully-written during such an incredibly busy and stressful time.
Reading this in late 2022, however, I'm not sure it's aged so well. Clarke's narrative is infused with the fear that was everywhere in spring 2020 but which occasionally seems a little silly from this distance. She focusses extensively on the risk and she and her fellow doctors faced in going to work each day (often with inadequate PPE) but doesn't so much acknowledge how the risk was relatively low for healthy young people. I by no means want to undermine the courage of NHS staff during the pandemic, particularly since, as Clarke points out, many did die of COVID. That said, the stories Clarke chooses to tell make the virus out to be a relentless killing machine, striking down everyone in its path. Now in hindsight, as we know a little more about COVID and its mortality rate, her writing does appear a tad overblown.
Similarly, her constant praise of the NHS and criticism of the government does tend to get a little repetitive. I'm sure there's much to praise about the NHS, and Clarke's book does leave me with a renewed admiration for the many wonderful people working in our health service. Similarly, the government did make a complete mess of so many aspects of the pandemic. The issue is that the book does little more than give us a series of anecdotes where the moral is either "The NHS is Wonderful" or "The Government is Incompetent Again." I don't think pretty much anyone these days thinks that the NHS is rubbish, or that the government handled the pandemic well, and Clarke has no particularly new insights or critiques to add.
What I'd love to see would be Clarke's thoughts on the pandemic in retrospect, say in a year or so. Her writing is crisp and clear and her ability to write a non-self-indulgent memoir is impressive. While BREATHTAKING was written slightly too much "in the thick of it" to have lasting power, I'd be keen to read her reflections on the past few years as we begin to move forward.
Reading this in late 2022, however, I'm not sure it's aged so well. Clarke's narrative is infused with the fear that was everywhere in spring 2020 but which occasionally seems a little silly from this distance. She focusses extensively on the risk and she and her fellow doctors faced in going to work each day (often with inadequate PPE) but doesn't so much acknowledge how the risk was relatively low for healthy young people. I by no means want to undermine the courage of NHS staff during the pandemic, particularly since, as Clarke points out, many did die of COVID. That said, the stories Clarke chooses to tell make the virus out to be a relentless killing machine, striking down everyone in its path. Now in hindsight, as we know a little more about COVID and its mortality rate, her writing does appear a tad overblown.
Similarly, her constant praise of the NHS and criticism of the government does tend to get a little repetitive. I'm sure there's much to praise about the NHS, and Clarke's book does leave me with a renewed admiration for the many wonderful people working in our health service. Similarly, the government did make a complete mess of so many aspects of the pandemic. The issue is that the book does little more than give us a series of anecdotes where the moral is either "The NHS is Wonderful" or "The Government is Incompetent Again." I don't think pretty much anyone these days thinks that the NHS is rubbish, or that the government handled the pandemic well, and Clarke has no particularly new insights or critiques to add.
What I'd love to see would be Clarke's thoughts on the pandemic in retrospect, say in a year or so. Her writing is crisp and clear and her ability to write a non-self-indulgent memoir is impressive. While BREATHTAKING was written slightly too much "in the thick of it" to have lasting power, I'd be keen to read her reflections on the past few years as we begin to move forward.
May 9, 2021
Nothing more here than in many newspaper articles on Covid. Such a shame as I thought her first two books were excellent. DNF @ 40%.
August 21, 2023
❝ i want to give this book a 2.5 stars, but 3 stars is okay! it was a really emotional and educational read, but i do have a few little comments about it.
i love that this book is written from a carer / care home perspective. i think covid was a difficult time for all of us on an individual and personal level, but it is truly hard to grasp different situations unless you experience them yourself. so, i did like the perspective it was written from. it helps you to see it in such a different light.
i do wish there was more detail surrounding the people she would mention. more often than not, she would reference someone and their story but all we knew about them was their name and what they did for a living. i think more insight into their background and personalities would have been nice.
i also think that there was a little too much repetition in it. though i think it was very very important to reiterate the repetitiveness of covid, of life indoors and of the true ignorance of the government. but, i think the book would have benefitted more by explaining these situations in more depth, rather than repeating the same words. i think that would have helped to reiterate her point and get across truly how awful it was.
overall, though, i did quite enjoy reading it. it was a heartfelt read, and i think it was very easy to grasp what she was feeling. i think, with a story like this, that is very important. ☁️ ❞
i love that this book is written from a carer / care home perspective. i think covid was a difficult time for all of us on an individual and personal level, but it is truly hard to grasp different situations unless you experience them yourself. so, i did like the perspective it was written from. it helps you to see it in such a different light.
i do wish there was more detail surrounding the people she would mention. more often than not, she would reference someone and their story but all we knew about them was their name and what they did for a living. i think more insight into their background and personalities would have been nice.
i also think that there was a little too much repetition in it. though i think it was very very important to reiterate the repetitiveness of covid, of life indoors and of the true ignorance of the government. but, i think the book would have benefitted more by explaining these situations in more depth, rather than repeating the same words. i think that would have helped to reiterate her point and get across truly how awful it was.
overall, though, i did quite enjoy reading it. it was a heartfelt read, and i think it was very easy to grasp what she was feeling. i think, with a story like this, that is very important. ☁️ ❞
February 20, 2024
This book is certainly “Breathtaking” in more ways than one. It is written in a very different style to the previous book that I have read by this author. It is a distressing read, not for the faint hearted, but it certainly brings home the seriousness of the Covid pandemic and its catastrophic effects on this country.
October 26, 2021
Don't bother!
May 23, 2021
I felt I should read a book about front line experience in the NHS at the time of COVID. I had Rachel Clarke’s book on end of life care Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss on my to-read list, but decided to go for this one.
Although it primarily recounts experiences of Rachel and other ICU staff during the first lock down, it felt important to be reminded of what it was like in the NHS as the virus approached and then took over. There are perhaps understandable hints of anger at lack of funding of the NHS, lack of social care policy and asking medical staff to risk their lives to care for patients with insufficient PPE. However this sentiment does not dominate.
In the main, this is a lovely story of how basic human skills of listening and being present in the room really matter. The ICU staff, enveloped in PPE equipment, tending prone patients with no personal effects around them still make sure that no-one dies alone. A student who has no personal experience of death, volunteers to make the phone calls to relatives anxious for news about their loved ones each day. A keen crocheter crochets 60 hearts on her sixtieth birthday and donates them to her local ICU to spread a little love. They are used as tokens to link relatives and their loved ones - each have a heart, the patient with the heart on their pillow.
The one thing that I hope that Covid has taught us all, is to value the things that really matter. This book shows that human acts of kindness and compassion are special and powerful tools to ease human suffering.
Although it primarily recounts experiences of Rachel and other ICU staff during the first lock down, it felt important to be reminded of what it was like in the NHS as the virus approached and then took over. There are perhaps understandable hints of anger at lack of funding of the NHS, lack of social care policy and asking medical staff to risk their lives to care for patients with insufficient PPE. However this sentiment does not dominate.
In the main, this is a lovely story of how basic human skills of listening and being present in the room really matter. The ICU staff, enveloped in PPE equipment, tending prone patients with no personal effects around them still make sure that no-one dies alone. A student who has no personal experience of death, volunteers to make the phone calls to relatives anxious for news about their loved ones each day. A keen crocheter crochets 60 hearts on her sixtieth birthday and donates them to her local ICU to spread a little love. They are used as tokens to link relatives and their loved ones - each have a heart, the patient with the heart on their pillow.
The one thing that I hope that Covid has taught us all, is to value the things that really matter. This book shows that human acts of kindness and compassion are special and powerful tools to ease human suffering.
June 6, 2024
This had been sat on my book shelf waiting to be read for a very long time. I knew before I started reading this that I’d struggle to read this book.
The reason being is because I worked five twelve hour night shifts a week back to back on a dedicated respiratory Covid unit.
I lost a lot of weight purely due to sweating so much. I sat and held the hand of the dying when there was no one else to sit and be with them.
Family was not allowed in and the world had come to a standstill still like Britain had never seen before.
I was stopped multiple times by the police on my way to work. The world was like something out of a movie.
A colleague contracted Covid and sadly passed away. The death toll on the news just kept rising daily. My partner at the time didn’t understand and I could not talk to her about the shear number of bodies we were sending to be placed into refrigerator units set up in the hospital grounds.
As a result of the Covid 19 pandemic that swept across the planet, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and as a result I had to leave the N.H.S.
I loved my job, I loved caring for people and being there to help in their time of need. Yet I could not face the job any more.
This book was hard for me to read but it is an amazing account of what life was life for those that had to work through it. It’s an account of what life was life for the people unlucky to contract the deadly respiratory disease.
The reason being is because I worked five twelve hour night shifts a week back to back on a dedicated respiratory Covid unit.
I lost a lot of weight purely due to sweating so much. I sat and held the hand of the dying when there was no one else to sit and be with them.
Family was not allowed in and the world had come to a standstill still like Britain had never seen before.
I was stopped multiple times by the police on my way to work. The world was like something out of a movie.
A colleague contracted Covid and sadly passed away. The death toll on the news just kept rising daily. My partner at the time didn’t understand and I could not talk to her about the shear number of bodies we were sending to be placed into refrigerator units set up in the hospital grounds.
As a result of the Covid 19 pandemic that swept across the planet, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and as a result I had to leave the N.H.S.
I loved my job, I loved caring for people and being there to help in their time of need. Yet I could not face the job any more.
This book was hard for me to read but it is an amazing account of what life was life for those that had to work through it. It’s an account of what life was life for the people unlucky to contract the deadly respiratory disease.
February 16, 2021
I really do not have the words to do justice to this extraordinary work. Rachel Clarke’s writing, which is always powerful, has never been more powerful or important. Every Covid denier and person pressing for an early release of lockdown should read this book.
I give my grateful thanks to Rachel for writing this book and for her dedication to her patients throughout her career and especially during the crisis. I also give my grateful thanks to all medics and health and care staff who all know the true horror of Covid and keep turning up at work to take care of those who succumb to this hideous disease. I hope cool heads will prevail and we steer a careful, slow path out of this disaster. Guided, by science and medicine not a desire to rush back to the pub or onto a plane!
I give my grateful thanks to Rachel for writing this book and for her dedication to her patients throughout her career and especially during the crisis. I also give my grateful thanks to all medics and health and care staff who all know the true horror of Covid and keep turning up at work to take care of those who succumb to this hideous disease. I hope cool heads will prevail and we steer a careful, slow path out of this disaster. Guided, by science and medicine not a desire to rush back to the pub or onto a plane!
June 6, 2021
Such a difficult and confusing review pops up in my mind. As a brazilian, still living in a very much present pandemic of COVID, an account of the pandemic in the UK between january and april 2020 feels distorted. People are tired and here it feels like they're saturated of the situation and life has been forced into normality again even when over 2000 people are dying everyday of COVID, with a current death toll of over 460 thousand people in Brazil. The author's account is raw and necessary, even if often repetitive. It reads like it is: an overwhelmed doctor/person venting to no one in particular. A necessary book and a must read. I would love to have a similar book written in 2021 by a Brazilian doctor.
January 26, 2021
Thank you for this insight Rachel.
This book gave me a feeling of hope, pride and gratitude for all who work in health and social care, mixed with a calm, focused analysis of the consistent failures of the current government.
I'd kind of forgotten how horrible and frightening the start of last year was, really interesting to reflect on our recent history that already feels like much longer ago.
This book gave me a feeling of hope, pride and gratitude for all who work in health and social care, mixed with a calm, focused analysis of the consistent failures of the current government.
I'd kind of forgotten how horrible and frightening the start of last year was, really interesting to reflect on our recent history that already feels like much longer ago.
January 25, 2024
I hope that the government ministers and their advisors are all reading this book and they realise how foolish they looked with all their overblown speeches and promises, when the real world was falling apart with so many tragedies that could have been avoided if they had just listened to and acted on the scientific advice when it was given and adhered to their own rules and delivered on their promises.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 2, 2021
This book is Breath taking. An insight into what our nhs staff had/still endure on a daily basis during covid. A first hand experience from March 2020 to August 2020 by a doctor working in a hospital dealing with the daily battles with covid. The lack of PPE, the lack of political leadership, failing to protect our elderly, disabled and people suffering from other illnesses . The harsh truth, laid bare. It is a hard, insightful read, one which we should all take the time to read.
May 21, 2021
A heartbreaking but exceptional book that really does take your breath away. It shows the amazing courage and bravery of both health workers and patients during the COVID19 pandemic. A brilliant inside story that everyone in the UK should read.
December 12, 2021
I suspect that nothing Dr. Clarke writes will ever beat Dear Life, but this one did have flashes of her genius. I wonder whether she would have a similar conclusion were she finishing the book now, or whether the intervening months have worn down her optimism about human beings, as they have mine.
June 5, 2024
Really well written and accurate portrayal of working through covid. Difficult read at points and fuelled my continued rage at the Tory party and that buffoon Boris Johnson at the way lockdown was handled.
February 4, 2021
I cried, I swore, a good and moving book.
February 25, 2021
This is tough reading. It covers up to August 2020, and there have been so many more people becoming sick and dying since then.
October 26, 2021
The worst book I've ever read, extremely preachy and I felt like it was full of lies.
Not recommended.
Not recommended.
October 26, 2021
I heard there may be another loo roll shortage, so I bought this to wipe my arse on.
November 21, 2021
Deeply moving. Makes you appreciate what medical staff went through in the UK.
March 14, 2021
I have yet to read Rachel Clarke's other books. The way things work with the library reserve system it turned out to be easier to get myself first in the queue for this new one which may not be the best place to start. In a sense, reading it is performative rather than necessary if you have read her excellent columns, or indeed similar columns by others, and I felt a faint uncomfortable thought about the appropriateness of reading. There's a lot of joking about doctors' writing but that's the graphology, many of them it seems write very well.... and here she explains how she found the time to write (something which often causes me cognitive dissonance between the content and the existence in my hand of volumes of medical memoir) and more importantly why. It is also a weird experience to read about January to April 2020 (with some additions from an August 2020) perspective a year on. Hey, vaccines, ho, more waves, more lockdowns. I am also finding it increasingly difficult to read about how very much more wonderful hospice in-patient care is than hospital care when that was, shockingly, not my experience. There's also much to unpack about begging for a hospital Covid role and the concerns of her children (gender irrelevant)
October 27, 2021
Not my favourite book. On later reflection I find it interesting lots of the big media figures are profiting by releasing books yet the media have the narrative it’s human rights people etc profiting when lots I know haven’t made a pence. If they care so much about the NHS, health etc why don’t they donate book proceeds to it? I don’t think these people are who they claim they are.
June 3, 2023
Really liked this book. Original account of the COVID-19 pandemic from NY Day 2020-April 2020 (peak in the UK). From the perspective of an NHS palliative care doctor who looks at different cases of people affected by the pandemic. Quite technical at parts so requires a bit of attention but worth it to really understand the struggles many NHS doctors experienced.
October 26, 2021
There are many books that once I start to read I find them hard to put down, the exact opposite is true of this drivel written by Clarke.
Once I had put the book down it would have been a chore to start reading it again, so it was chucked in the recycle bin.
Don't waste your time and money.
Once I had put the book down it would have been a chore to start reading it again, so it was chucked in the recycle bin.
Don't waste your time and money.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 164 reviews