Like the ‘chimeras’ of the genetic technology she describes, Olivia Gordon’s The First Breath skilfully integrates multiple genres to provide a gripping tale of foetal and neonatal medicine. Part medical memoir, part motherhood memoir and part historical account, The First Breath tells of a generation of children who, even as…

‘I would live your life so much better than you if I had your face’ remarks Sujin, one of the characters in Frances Cha’s eponymously titled debut novel If I Had Your Face.[1] This superficial remark has excoriatingly poignant consequences for the lives of the four fictitious women whose journey…

‘Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous.’ [1] Building on this analogy, Jenny Offill characterizes…

‘White people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race’ remarks one of the characters in Bernadine Evaristo’s Booker Prize winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019). This widely unacknowledged truism forms the foundation of Evaristo’s work. …

[The author, Seamus O’Mahony, is a recently retired hospital consultant (gastroenterology) of 35 years’s experience, who worked both in England and Ireland. He was kind enough to agree to be one of the plenary speakers at the (now postponed) Medicine 360 festival. He is also the author of two acclaimed…