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An astonishing memoir about nursing and a call to arms for compassion and kindness

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Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A and E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astonishing account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness.

We watch Christie with a new mother holding her premature son who has miraculously made it through the night, we stand by her side as she spends many hours watching agonising heart and lung surgery, and we hold our breath as she washes the hair of a child fatally injured in a fire, attempting to remove the toxic smell of smoke before the grieving family arrive.

In our most extreme moments, when life is lived most intensely, Christie is there by your side. She is a guide, mentor and friend. And in these dark days of division and isolationism, she encourages you to stretch out your hand.

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"If it´s taken a very long time to get a memoir written by a nurse, then it was certainly worth the wait. I have rarely read anything that has moved me as much or taken me by the hand so confidently into an unknown world, teeming with life and haunted by death... A remarkable book that I will be pressing on everyone I love" Allison Pearson The Sunday Telegraph

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Christie Watson was a registered nurse for twenty years. Her first novel, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away, won the Costa First Novel Award and the Waverton Good Read Award, and she was named as Red Magazine´s Hot Woman of the Year (Creative). Where Women Are Kings, her second novel, was also published to international critical acclaim, and her works have been translated into twenty-two languages. Christie has recently won a Future Shapers Award from Marie Claire for nursing activism, and awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters, honoris causa for her contribution to nursing and the arts by the University of East Anglia. She is patron of the Royal College of Nursing Foundation.

https://twitter.com/tinysunbird

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