A Fortunate Woman

Polly Morland, Richard Baker

From Shelf: Official Indie Non-Fiction Bestsellers (week 13, 2023)

A moving, evocative account of a rural GP in a remote location.

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford PrizeThe Top Ten BestsellerWaterstones Non-Fiction Book of the MonthA Sunday Times Paperback of the Year 'If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading' - Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford judgeWhen Polly Morland is clearing out her mother's house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine - she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own.In A Fortunate Woman, with its beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, Polly Morland has written a profoundly moving love letter to a landscape, a community and, above all, to what it means to be a good doctor.'Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry' - Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times'Timely . . . compelling . . . a delicately drawn miniature' - Financial Times'This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape' - Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman