A teenage victim of a knife attack. A young girl who has nearly lost her leg in a boating accident. A survivor of a major terrorist attack at Westminster Bridge. Trauma surgeon Shehan Hettiaratchy has seen all these people on his operating table. In The Careful Surgeon he explains how it feels to take the lives of these people into his hands.

In this powerful, blood-stopping and incisive insight into the life of a trauma surgeon, Shehan takes us into the heart of what it takes to train, practice, perform and - mostly - perfect his surgical skills. Through real-life case studies of patients, he explains how the emotional connection he makes with them must be set aside the moment he takes a knife to cut them open.

With unflinching honesty, he shows us how things can go wrong within a heartbeat and how, when the darkness sets in, he is able to get up and do it all over again. For, ultimately it is Shehan's patients who show him the light - coping with the very worst life can throw at them, fighting their way back to life - and allow him to do the job he so loves.

Radiant with light and darkness, this is a book full of scenes of life and death that the rest of us rarely even glimmer.