Christie Watson

Nurses have never been more important. We benefit from their expertise in our hospitals and beyond: in our schools, on our streets, in prisons, hospices and care homes. When we feel most alone, nurses remind us that we are not alone at all. In The Courage to Care best-selling author Christie Watson reveals the remarkable extent of nurses’ work. A community mental-health nurse choreographs support for a man suffering from severe depression. A teen with stab wounds is treated by the critical-care team; his school nurse visits and he drops the bravado. A pregnant woman loses frightening amounts of blood following a car accident; it is a military nurse who synchronises the emergency department into immaculate order and focus.Christie makes a further discovery: that, time and again, it is patients and their families - including her own - who show exceptional strength in the most challenging times. We are all deserving of compassion, and as we share in each other’s suffering, Christie Watson shows us how we can find courage too. The courage to care.

Unexpected deaths and untoward incidents are becoming alarmingly frequent at City Hospital's Emergency Department. A&E Senior Sister, Aoife, begins to question whether her new nurses are incompetent - or worse.

Earnest recruit Eden cares deeply for her patients and carries the Code of Conduct around in her pocket, reporting everyone whose views don't align with hers. But despite her self-righteousness, Eden keeps making mistakes. Is she dangerous?

It is Sophie who worries Aoife the most. Acerbic, over-confident and seemingly lacking in empathy, how Sophie ever became a nurse is beyond her. When Sophie begins an affair with Aoife's best friend, Michael, a man twenty-five years her senior, tensions escalate further, threatening to eclipse the fact that lives are at stake.

Aoife is the nurse we'd all want. Compassionate to the core. She's the nicest, kindest nurse in the world. Until she is tested to the limit...

Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astonishing account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness.

We watch Christie as she nurses a premature baby who has miraculously made it through the night, we stand by her side during her patient's agonising heart-lung transplant, and we hold our breath as she washes the hair of a child fatally injured in a fire, attempting to remove the toxic smell of smoke before the grieving family arrive.

In our most extreme moments, when life is lived most intensely, Christie is with us. She is a guide, mentor and friend. And in these dark days of division and isolationism, she encourages us all to stretch out a hand.

Olivia, Laura and Anjali couldn't be more different. Inseparable since the first day of medical school, their bond has remained unbreakable. Years ago, they promised nothing would come between them - including the wild university party that forced them to make a deadly choice.

Now working as doctors in high-pressure jobs, with lives and families of their own, their secret binds them tighter still. But when an eerily similar tragedy affects their teenage children, the choice the three women face may not be one their friendship can survive...

There is something raw in the fault lines, something wilder and more mysterious. There is beauty in the falling apart, a less polished, more honest version of expression.

In her early twenties, Christie Watson was convinced she'd found her soulmate, in a glowing flash of light that turned out to be her tealights setting her quilt on fire. Twenty years later, her bed is burning once again... as she wakes in a perimenopausal sweat, night after night.

This is the story of her journey through mid-life: of the joy of letting go and the pain of the morning after, of the unstoppable power of female friendship and the struggle to raise teenagers as a single parent. It lays bare the exhilaration, agony, wonder and fears of being a middle-aged woman with a wild heart, a changing body and a new set of challenges. And as her world takes on a different shape, there's something else she starts to feel: the hot flush of possibility.

'I adore Christie Watson. Quilt on Fire is full of her trademark candour, compassion and humour. A wildly entertaining - and necessary book' ELIZABETH DAY