Rachel Clarke Dear Life & Breathtaking 2 Books Collection Set - Non Fiction - Paperback

Titles in This Set
Dear Life
Breathtaking

Details
Condition: Brand New
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Abacus
Book Count: 2

Overview
This two-book paperback collection brings together Rachel Clarke's most personal and urgent works of medical memoir. Dear Life explores her calling as a palliative care doctor alongside the devastating loss of her own father, while Breathtaking places readers on the front line of the NHS during the earliest, most frightening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Written with a doctor's precision and a daughter's tenderness, both books ask what it means to care for others when time, resources, and certainty are all running out, making this set essential reading for anyone drawn to honest, humane non-fiction about medicine, mortality, and resilience.

About the Books
Rachel Clarke writes from the rare vantage point of someone who has practiced medicine and also mastered the craft of storytelling, having worked as a journalist before retraining as a doctor. Dear Life is her account of choosing palliative care as a specialty, built around candid scenes from hospice wards and hospital bedsides where she helps patients and families face the end of life with dignity. Running through the book is the parallel story of her father's terminal cancer diagnosis, which turns her professional expertise into an intensely personal reckoning with grief, memory, and love. The result is a memoir that refuses to look away from death while insisting, again and again, on the tenderness and meaning that can be found within it. Breathtaking shifts the setting from the hospice to the hospital ward during the first wave of COVID-19, when Clarke and her colleagues faced overwhelmed intensive care units, scarce protective equipment, and patients dying without their families beside them. She writes with the same clear-eyed compassion, documenting exhausted staff, difficult triage decisions, and small moments of humanity that persisted even as the health system strained under unprecedented pressure. Read together, the two books trace a powerful arc from one doctor's private grief to a nation's shared crisis, showing how the instinct to care for others endures whether the challenge is a single dying patient or an entire health service under siege. Both are grounded in real clinical experience rather than abstraction, giving readers an unusually intimate window into modern British medicine.

Key Benefits

• Two complete paperback memoirs by NHS doctor and former journalist Rachel Clarke
• Written with first-hand clinical experience, not secondhand reporting
• Explores end-of-life care, grief, and the COVID-19 pandemic with honesty and compassion
• Ideal for readers of medical memoir, narrative non-fiction, and books about the NHS
• A thoughtful gift for healthcare workers, book clubs, and fans of reflective non-fiction
• Brand new paperback copies, ready to read or gift straight away

Book-by-Book Guide
Dear Life — A palliative care doctor's memoir weaving her hospice work with the story of her father's terminal illness.
Breathtaking — A frontline account of the NHS during the first wave of COVID-19, told by a doctor who lived it.

About the Author
Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor in the UK's National Health Service and a former television journalist. She turned to medicine after a career in current affairs, drawn by a desire to work more directly with people at the most vulnerable moments of their lives. Clarke has written extensively about end-of-life care, the culture of the NHS, and the realities faced by doctors and patients, combining clinical insight with a journalist's instinct for story. Her memoirs, including Dear Life and Breathtaking, are known for their unflinching honesty and deep compassion for the people she treats.

Why You'll Love This Collection
Honest, moving, and beautifully written, this pairing of Dear Life and Breathtaking offers a rare, humane look at modern medicine from someone who has lived it. A meaningful gift for Mother's Day, a retiring nurse, a book club pick, or anyone who values true stories about courage, care, and love.

Please Note: This is the UK edition with the ISBN as listed; the cover may vary slightly from the image shown.