1
2
Free Standard Delivery
On orders over £35
Next Day Delivery
£3.99 On Orders over £35
Book Points
Earn 10 points for every £1 spent
🚚 Order by 1pm for same day dispatch.
Details
Condition: BRAND NEW
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781529111071
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Age Range: Adult Readers
Overview
The Courage to Care: A Call for Compassion is a moving non-fiction memoir from bestselling author and former nurse Christie Watson. Drawing on real hospital encounters, Watson explores how nurses, patients and families summon extraordinary courage during moments of crisis. Written with warmth, honesty and clinical insight, this paperback is a powerful tribute to the everyday heroism found in caregiving, and a compelling reminder that compassion is a skill we can all learn to practise, in hospitals and in our everyday lives.
About the Book
In a series of vivid, true-to-life vignettes, Christie Watson takes readers inside the wards, waiting rooms and homes where nurses quietly hold people together. A community mental-health nurse coordinates support for a man in crisis; a critical-care team treats a teenager with stab wounds, only for his bravado to dissolve once a familiar face arrives; a military nurse brings calm to an emergency after a pregnant woman loses dangerous amounts of blood. These stories reveal nursing not simply as a job, but as sustained compassion under pressure.
What sets this memoir apart is Watson's insistence that courage and care are not confined to hospital corridors. She observes that patients and their families - including her own - display the same resilience as the professionals treating them. The book becomes a wider meditation on empathy: how we notice suffering, respond to it, and cultivate compassion as a deliberate practice. Watson's prose is unflinching about pressures facing modern healthcare, yet consistently hopeful about the people within it.
The Courage to Care sits alongside Watson's earlier bestseller as essential reading for anyone who has needed care, given care, or wondered what keeps our health services human.
Key Benefits
- Real, true-life nursing stories that reveal the hidden acts of courage behind everyday healthcare.
- Written by a bestselling former nurse with genuine clinical experience and literary skill.
- Explores mental-health nursing, emergency care and family resilience in crisis.
- A thought-provoking read for healthcare workers, carers, book clubs and general non-fiction readers.
- Compact, easy-to-read paperback format ideal for gifting or personal reflection.
About the Author
Christie Watson worked as a registered nurse for twenty years before turning to writing. She is the author of The Language of Kindness, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller that spent five months in the UK top ten and was shortlisted for several major non-fiction prizes. Her debut novel won the Costa First Novel Award. Watson is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and writes regularly for national newspapers, combining first-hand medical experience with acclaimed storytelling.
Why You'll Love This Memoir
Honest, humane and quietly moving, The Courage to Care offers a rare inside view of modern nursing. It's a book that lingers - reminding readers that compassion, in a hospital or anywhere else, is always a choice worth making.
Please Note: Cover may vary slightly from image shown; this is the UK edition with UK ISBN 9781529111071 as listed.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.