In these gripping accounts of true cases, bestselling author Atul Gawande performs exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealised form, but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing and profoundly human.

This is a stunningly well-written account of the life of a surgeon: what it is like to cut into people's bodies and the terrifying - literally life and death - decisions that have to be made: operations that go wrong; of doctors who go to the bad; why autopsies are necessary; what it feels like to insert your knife into someone.

'Written as tautly as a thriller' Observer