Fragile Lives

Steve Westaby is a celebrated world-famous heart surgeon who is renowned for being the first surgeon in history to fit a patient with a new type of artificial heart. During his 35 year career as a surgeon he worked at several of the UK’s top hospitals and performed over 11,000 heart operations. He won The Midlander of the Year Award (2002) and a Ray C. Fish Award for Scientific Achievement (2004). In 2004 Steve Westaby was featured in the BBC documentary Your Life in Their Hands which is a long-running series on the subject of surgery.

‘Raw and moving… the writing is thrilling. Fragile Lives is a frank and absorbing memoir by a man who has done about as much good to his fellow human beings as it is possible to do in one lifetime.’ – The Times, Book of the Week‘The stakes could not be higher in this bloody, muscular and adrenaline-charged memoir from a pioneering heart surgeon… at points it made my own heart race dangerously. ‘Surgeons are meant to be objective,’ Westaby tells himself, ‘not human’. What makes this book so fascinating, and so moving, is the terrible tension between these necessary qualities.’ – Sunday Times‘A full-frontal and thrilling portrayal. Each story in this fascinating book brings a new nail-biting surgical adventure… A gifted surgeon, Westaby is also a natural writer… Fragile Lives succeeds on many levels: political battle cry, chronicle of bloody feats, history of modern cardiology, tribute to patients and paean to surgery.’ – Daily Telegraph‘Westaby is everything you would hope from a maverick surgical genius: authoritative, engaged, passionate and opinionated. His book, annoyingly well written for someone who has penned only medical papers and handbooks, reads like a thriller, except with rather more corpses. You race to each chapter’s end to see if his certain-to-die patient survives.’ – The Times‘The book is a cracking example of a thriving sub-genre of autobiography, the medical memoir. Anyone who enjoyed the 2014 bestseller Do No Harm by the brain surgeon Henry Marsh, a friend of Westaby’s, will relish Fragile Lives, too. Each story is gripping, written in a vivid, almost brutal way that matches the blood and gore of cardiac surgery.’ – Financial Times'At the cutting-edge of scalpel-lit… I love getting a window into this world… I enjoyed so much in this book – the anatomy lesson, the vivid descriptions, the fervour Westaby feels for his work' – Evening Standard