Everything Is True: A Junior Doctor's Story of Life, Death and Grief in a Time of Pandemic

by Roopa Farooki

From the frontlines of the NHS, the story of a junior doctor's love, loss and grief through the Covid-19 crisis

In early 2020, junior doctor Roopa Farooki lost her sister to cancer. But just weeks later, she found herself plunged into another kind of crisis, fighting on the frontline of the battle taking place in her hospital, and in hospitals across the country.

Everything is True is the story of Roopa’s first forty days of the Covid-19 crisis from the frontlines of A&E and the acute medical wards, as struggling through her grief, she battles for her patients’ and colleagues’ survival. Working thirteen-hour shifts, she returns home each evening to write through her exhaustion, chronicling the devastating losses and slowly eroding dehumanisation happening in real time on the ward.

At once an unflinching insider’s account of medicine in the time of coronavirus, and the devastating story of a sister’s grief, Everything is True is an exhilarating memoir of holding on to that which makes us human against insurmountable odds.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Medical, Biography, Medicine, Politics

240 pages, Hardcover

Published January 20, 2021

About the author

Roopa was brought up in London and graduated from New College in Oxford in 1995. She worked in advertising and it 2004 quit to write full time. She now lives in south east London and south west France with her husband and two sons. Bitter Sweets is her first novel and in 2007 it was nominated for the Orange Award for New Writer.

Her second novel, Corner Shop was released in October 2008 and her third novel is due in 2009.

Reviews

[Ruthy lavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving and emotive autobiographical book, written in the 3rd person by an NHS junior doctor during the first lockdown of the pandemic.
Although we would all love to put Covid firmly behind us now, it still features in our lives and probably always will, and this is an important account of those frightening first few months from the perspective of a frontline worker.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Farooki is a novelist, lecturer, mum of four, and junior doctor. Her storytelling choices owe more to literary fiction than to impassive reportage. The second-person, present-tense narration drops readers right into her position. Frequent line breaks and repetition almost give the prose the rhythm of performance poetry. There is also wry humour, wordplay, slang and cursing. In February 2020, her sister Kiron had died of breast cancer. During the first 40 days of the initial UK lockdown – the book’s limited timeframe – she continues to talk to Kiron, and imagines she can hear her sister’s chiding replies. Grief opens the door for magic realism, despite the title – which comes from a Balzac quote. A hybrid work that reads as fluidly as a novel while dramatizing real events, this is sure to appeal to people who wouldn’t normally pick up a bereavement or medical memoir.

See my full review at Shiny New Books.

[하요진 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall: 4/5

This book hits me differently. It is written in 2nd person point of view, which is something that I normally wouldn't get exposed to a lot. So this is a very unique experience. The author reveals the harshness of the pandemic on medical workers and how society and media take medical services for granted. In Hong Kong, people know that medical services are significant to society. However, the supply of medical resources is perennially in shortage. (Even not in a pandemic) And people on social media did nothing to help by blaming the doctors and nurses. They were under a lot of pressure and burden by taking the responsibility to care for patients, Covid or not.

[Honey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A grieving junior doctor recounts the first 40 days of lockdown in the UK. I have read so many accounts of the pandemic through work and colleagues, but this one hit closer to home more than others.

It’s unapologetic for its political stance, raw with stoicism but full of heart, and fairly eye-opening on what actually happened on the frontline.

I’d actually love to give these to the anti-vaxxers, Covidiots, and deniers of the world.

[Katey Lovell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished Roopa Farooki's Everything Is True. It's a heartbreaking read about the struggle of a grieving junior doctor during the first 40 days of the pandemic. Beautiful, painful and appropriate. Didn't expect to, but held it together right up until the acknowledgements.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Undoubtedly well-written but somehow its overt literariness detracted/distanced from the reality of the experience. I found the immediacy and rawness of Rachel Clarke's Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic much more emotionally affecting.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rooper Farooki is a junior doctor & at the start of the Covid pandemic she lost her sister to cancer. This is the account of the first forty days of the lockdown in 2020. I found the style of writing quite off-putting It is a hard hitting often difficult read. I found I could only manage it in small doses. However it does bring home the horrors the author & her colleagues had/have to endure. Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I am glad I read it.

[Lilly B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, incredible book - second person is hard to do well but I think this is probably the best book i’ve ever read written in second person. Properly raw, captures the grief of losing a sister to cancer phenomenally well. would recommend to anyone but only when you’re mentally prepared for something depressing

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the final sentence that makes me think that everyone who died before 2020 has no idea what happened in our world and that is astonishing. I think about my loved ones who have died who would be surprised to hear of lockdowns, social distancing, masks ect. This is the most "current" account of history that I've read about in recent years and it amazes me that we lived through the pandemic, and yes, everything is true.

I have rated this 3/5 as the author writes from the second person perspective. As this is a memoir and recounting her personal experience, it can be confusing and the story does not flow easily.

[Vonprice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A raw and powerful personal account of the pandemic written by a junior doctor and acclaimed author. Read my full review here:

http://vsviewfromthebookshelves.home....

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Farooki’s recount Everything is True is a powerful account of what being in the Covid frontline was like for professionals within the NHS. Her book depicts what the first forty days of lockdown was like for a junior doctor who is a mother of four, and all her emotions and dilemmas are always made clear to the reader. A beautiful yet truthful second person narrative, mixed in with political ideas and philosophical concept, Farooki perfects the art of allowing readers to be in her shoes, and giving them a perfect temporal-based walkthrough of her experiences, starting from the tragic death of her sister as a result of breast cancer.
Farooki discusses the hardships of coping with the difficulties of being a doctor during a time of crisis. One of these things are being honest, something which many health professionals found especially difficult during the pandemic, with many faking being sick just to avoid having to work another day full of long hours. However, Farooki talks about how the benefits often outweigh the cons with her instinct to help those in need always coming before all else and her awareness of the adversities her patients are going through always being something she considers. Another thing that is often hard is for doctors not to make mistakes. The author details a particular instant where she was flagged and given a DATIX, a record of an avoidable medical error, because she was extremely fatigued and made a prescription error as a result. The message given to any aspiring doctors is that they must learn to adapt to the demands the workplace expect of them.
Farooki does not hide aspects of home life that adds to the difficulties she has in life, with her own family keeping their distance from her as she returns from being at a Covid ward due to her apparent uncleanliness. Even instances where her husband shouts at her due to this is being highlighted and the writer does not hesitate to showcase the emotional toll her family’s attitude to her is having, with detailed scenarios of her coming to tears. There is much about her dead sister as well, with her voice often being heard as if she is a living person speaking. This makes clear how significant Farooki’s sister was to her, and the reader is made aware of how much trust she had in her now deceased sibling and the close bond they shared which even death couldn’t fully sever.
Farooki’s children who she clearly loves dearly are mentioned many times in this book. Despite the pressures that she faces outside home, she is so dedicated to them that the smiles she inevitable always causes her children to have often radiates to readers, with recounts of them apologising to each other nicely after an argument and being happy afterwards warming our hearts and creating admiration for Farooki as a mother in addition to her as a doctor. Her dedication is shown even further through the care she gives for them despite being sick from coronavirus herself—she maintains physical distance but her emotional attachment remains at solid as steel.
Another hardship faced by doctors is the looming notion of death. Even as Farooki recovers herself from her bout of Covid, death is all around her. This may be in the news, where staggeringly high figures of death rates are portrayed daily, or may be in the hospital, where not only are scores of patients losing their lives, but also fellow co-workers, with description of nurses who Farooki had talked to only a little bit of time ago being no more. Difficult life or death dilemmas accompany the theme itself, with decisions as to how risky it is to put someone on a ventilator an especially prevalent choice that had to be made during the pandemic.
A final problem yet a very important one facing doctors working in the nationalised NHS is that of politics. Farooki integrates effectively small snippets of satire such as describing the PM in hospital during lockdown and the amount of care he was getting compared to a normal person in the same, if not a worse, situation. Jingoistic politicians who lie about the NHS and its glories are depicted, informing readers about how they may be misled by those in power about workers like her.
Overall, Farooki successfully and masterfully showcases her readers the challenges facing doctors like her during the pandemic, ranging from loss, to family, to stress and fatigue. In her masterpiece she describes how doctors are only human beings, and how many go beyond the realms of what is ordinary just to change someone’s life for the better. All this, whilst giving readers immense perspective, makes Everything is True an incredible emotive read.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful memoir of what it was like in the first stage of COVID-19 in a hospital in the UK, and how it felt to be in the midst of that chaos, while still grieving the recent loss of a family member.

One of Farooki's key messages is the contrast between how doctors were presented by the media and how it felt to be "on the frontlines", an image she was not comfortable with. There was no glory, and certainly no sense of sacrifice in the day-to-day struggle for scrubs, PPE, and to do the best that was possible for patients in the wards. She did what was necessary at the time, and had little choice in the matter.

The parallels drawn between the World War I poem Dulce est decorum est by Wilfred Owen are striking. I'm glad I studied the poem at school, because it helped to understand this key perspective; if you do not know the poem, I highly recommend reading it to accompany the book. Farooki, like Owen, asks us not to desperately glorify suffering and sacrifice. No-one would wish for others to go through what medical staff went through, and none of them expected or "signed-up" for the difficulties they experienced.

Farooki also talks about the need to move away from providing meaningless gestures, and instead to provide the infrastructure that is needed, and report on the real (and many) people who were lost because of the lack of appropriate response. I hope that her memoir is read by journalists, politicians, and hospital administrators, as well as the general public. When the next pandemic comes, we need to have learned all we can and restructured so that we can provide a better response. To use another line associated with wartime sacrifice: Lest we forget—lest we forget!

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the blurb says, this is an account of just the first forty days of the pandemic, and appears to be just a tidied-up edition of Farooki's daily download of her thoughts and feelings at the end of each shift. As such it gives a very vivid and immediate account of what it felt like to be an NHS doctor during a period when all leave was canceled, PPE was in short supply, there was no vaccine, and medical staff risked their lives every day.

It would have been more immediate if Farooki had used "I" instead of the more distancing, MFA-workshoppy "you" throughout. And more relevant to the pandemic if she'd been on the Covid wards--it felt like she'd had little contact with Covid patients until she caught the disease herself, and then she wasn't hospitalized.

So it was interesting, but I'm looking forward to an account that covers the whole pandemic from someone specifically tasked with saving lives threatened by Covid. And, sorry, from a longer-term doctor--forgive me if I'm wrong, but Farooki's Wikipedia entry says she's now teaching creative writing, and that she became a doctor in 2019, so has she already quit after a couple of years? No judgment in that question--I couldn't do it--but the sales copy and the book fudge around that bit, and when a book is billed as coming from a doctor, I'd kind of like to know.

[Esther Kentish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Everything is True by Farooki was a deeply moving experience for me. The way the book captures the endless, numbing repetition of pandemic life—how each day blurs into the next—felt so real and raw. I found myself caught in that disorienting sense of time slipping away, where the shock of loss becomes almost normal, and that numbness weighs heavily on the soul.

Farooki’s fragmented storytelling echoed the chaos and confusion I imagine ICU wards experienced, and it made me feel the emotional toll on everyone involved—patients, families, and healthcare workers alike. The book didn’t try to smooth over the pain or offer easy answers. Instead, it held space for the uncertainty, the fatigue, and the slow erosion of hope.

What stayed with me most was how this narrative forced me to rethink time itself—not as a steady progression but as something broken, fluid, and difficult to grasp during moments of crisis. It made me more aware of how deeply the pandemic fractured not just our days, but our sense of self and connection.

Everything is True left me with a lingering sadness but also a profound respect for the resilience it portrays. It’s a book that doesn’t just tell a story—it makes you feel the weight of history in the making.

[Deotima Sarkar · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, in this autobiographical book, the author accounts for her experiences at the frontline, at NHS during the first 40 days of lockdown in the UK. She had just prior to it lost her sister to breast cancer. I found quite a much similarity to my life, where I to had lost my father to metastic cancer just before the lockdown too. There is a point where she writes that her sister could not have survived the pandemic and skipped the queue to afterlife. I felt the same for my dad!
.
The bits written in broken prose, punctuated, almost poetry like but depiction of reality, caught my fancy. I actually lived the stages with her, the increasing numbers, the deaths, the augmentation of fear and her imaginary talks with her dead sister.
.
I only wished the description could have continued a lil longer on to the pandemic. The insight and details however was pure realism and raw.
.
I have read many a book and accounts of the pandemic, this one I must say stood out in its portrayal and pure emotions.

[Charlotte Bale · Rating 4 out of 5]

An account of a junior doctor’s experience for the first 40 days of lockdown in the covid pandemic, following the loss of her sister to cancer. Written in the 2nd person, almost like bullet points or notes frantically written in a journal transported me into her story. Into her life. It felt frantic. Panicked. Which really brought back all the awful memories of the pandemic and how I remember it. Only for frontline workers, like soldiers in a war, this was much worse. There was news coverage at the time about everything going on, the struggles and lack of support for the NHS, but this account really brought to life how it was for the doctors and nurses, feeling helpless and unable to do anything but carry on because the country needed them and there was no one else. Putting on a brave face because they still had families at home, feeling selfish and terrified just doing their job. At times, a hard read, but a good one.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

The traumatic experience of workers in the NHS during Covid and the sheer incompetence, greed and negligence of the Tory government during that time is expressed with great clarity in this book. Its obvious that the writer of this tale is a published reputed author and there are poetic descriptions to intersperse some of the darker material. Maybe a time to reflect on how bloody lucky we are that anyone wants to work for the NHS, at a time when it is deliberately being run down so that privatisation can take place. Probably this book will make you angry if you care about these things and think they are important. At the same time as working through Covid, the author was coping with grief caused by the death of her sister. She was not impressed with the prescribed clapping and I dont for one moment blame her.

[Tracy Trafford · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to read this book. I have read a lot of books which are written by healthcare staff about their experiences, I like to hear about the stories of individual patients as well as the uniques experiences of the author.

I didn’t get much of either from this book. It is written in the 2nd person, and in the present tense.
I found this format very difficult to follow. I think I understand the concept but I did not enjoy the execution at all.

I can fully sympathise with the horrific circumstances for staff during the pandemic. However this book was almost exclusives listing the problems occurring in her workplace, and her feelings towards politicians. Maybe that was the point.
No detailed accounts of patient stories, which is what I hope for when reading this genre.

Disappointed unfortunately.

[CK Yau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reveals the impossible, bordering inhumane, working conditions in hospital during the pandemic, let alone the author was going through the personal tragedy of losing her sister to cancer.

But, probably it's just on me, I can't get used to her use of "you" while actually referring to herself. When I read memoirs, I'd step into the shoes of the authors, to experience mentally what they have been through. Hence, when they say "I ......", I'd soak it up like my experience.

However, when I tried to step into her shoes in this book, her use of "you" was like reminding me that I was just a reader, blocking my access to her shoes. But of coz, it's just my very personal feeling, no offense to Roopa at all.

[Ann Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's difficult to describe this book. It's a sort of short-form-paragraph journal of a doctor working for the national health service in England during the first month of COVID-19 lockdown. I find the relentless staccato rhythm of prose broken up into unending short paragraphs tiresome, but the author's style is suited to the sort of dream state she lives through as everything falls apart and her schedule and hospital protocols change every few hours. It's a powerful account, but not a deeply reflective one. It lives in the moments as they unfurl and captures how bizarre her experiences were during that time.

[Laurie-Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the way this book was written. I don't usually read books written in second person but in this scenario, it anchored the hard realities of the covid pandemic more firmly. From the impersonal writing style to the imagery (figures of speech, enumeration, repetition, etc) Farooki truly has a way with words.
Removed one star because the author seemed too good at times which made it hard to relate and empathise with her.

[The Contented · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great book, a very human book on feeling.

I could bear to listen to it as an audio book (the right length - 5 hours, listened to at 1.3x speed). Saw me through two days of cooking and commuting. Now I wonder what’s next. Probably a book-book

[Rosemary Flower · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in an unexpected style for non-fiction, this will be an interesting read in the future for those born post Covid-19. For those of us lucky enough to survive the pandemic this memoir casts a critical eye on the NHS behind the scene and the lack of preparedness on the part of the Government.

[Ian Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving and interesting. Very personal. Also somewhat strangely feels almost historical, being set almost 2 years ago.

[Chris Persson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful. Intense. A great perspective of a unique time.

[Suzanne Ashworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

powerful and shocking must -read - her barely contained fury and eloquence are overwhelming - mkae all politicians read this!

[Jocelyn Makin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent insight into the pandemic from a view so few of us could imagine. Definitely worth reading.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting read following the first forty days of lockdown for a NHS doctor.  A punchy and angry account.  

Anyone who has been or will be in charge of running the country should read this to get some understanding of what the people working in hospitals had to deal with.  This should not happen again, but I doubt they will learn lessons from the terrible failures.

As the book only covers the first forty days of lockdown I was hoping for a postscript as we all now know lockdowns lasted for much longer. Maybe there is/ will be another book?

[Bekah B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well that was bloody brutal, and raw, and harsh, and honest, and incredibly heartbreaking. I wish the the Prime Minister and his policy makers would read this. This is how we treated our 'NHS Heroes'. I dare anyone read this book and then tell me that a clap once a week was enough to show our appreciation of what medical professionals had to go through.
Anyway... I'll put my soap box away now and talk about the book. The writing style really dragged me into what was happening. No, it wasn't the most sophisticated, descriptive, great flowing writing but it was realistic and gripping. The author did a fantastic job of showing us what it felt like to work on the front line through the pandemic and it was horrific. Clinical work was finely woven with her personal life and the effects it was having on her and her family. It feels weird to say this was a great book because of the topic and the realities of it but it definitely did its job and was well written.

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's sister dies of breast cancer right before Covid hits, and RF is both grieving and working as an NHS Dr.
At a Zoom family birthday party: "You thought for a moment you could fool them, forget her death for the time it takes to sing and make small talk while the cake is cut. But the moment you flick on the screen, you see your own face, the mouth sagging at both edges. You see everyone else in their cosy squares, cuddling childen and grinning to the camera, and their smiles falter when you come on the shared screen. You've already spoiled the party."
"Nothing's funny if it's true."

People's lockdown behavior--drinking or eating too much, or over exercising. "You get to be a chunk, a hunk, or a drunk."

"You're afraid that a little bit of you wants to be in the place of highest risk. You wonder what this says about you."
4.5

Cambridgeshire library