From Thomas Mann to Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande, library shelves heave with stories about the struggle to understand and overcome illness. This month, we’ve teamed up with The Wellcome Book Prize, which celebrates literature that engages with the topics of health and medicine and the many ways they touch our lives. We interviewed two of the authors on their excellent shortlist: David France, whose narrative history How to Survive a Plague is a riveting and devastating first-hand account of the fight against AIDS in the USA; and Sarah Moss, whose fifth novel The Tidal Zone is a complex and beautiful story about family life in the wake of a serious medical emergency. Listen in for all this and a more general discussion of medicine in literature, as well as all the usual recommendations. So kick back, pop a Vitamin C, and let us be your remedy for the next hour.
