This is going to hurt

Adam Kay kept a diary throughout his years training as a junior doctor in the NHS, scribbling entries in the small hours after brutal, understaffed shifts. This Is Going to Hurt collects those entries into a memoir that is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely devastating.

Kay takes readers behind the curtain of the medical front line: the 97-hour weeks, the missed birthdays and weddings, the absurd patient encounters, and the life-and-death decisions made on almost no sleep. Beneath the comedy runs a serious argument — a tribute to the exhausted people who keep the health service running, and a sharp indictment of the system that grinds them down. The book builds toward the case that ultimately drove Kay out of medicine.

A number-one Sunday Times bestseller translated into dozens of languages and adapted into a BAFTA-winning television series, This Is Going to Hurt is one of the defining memoirs of modern medical life.