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livesinprint

Come and meet the Doctor
Hugh Thomson

Published: May 2024
Paperback: 110 pages
Price: £6.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-86-6
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
Come and Meet the Doctor
by Hugh J Thomson

Childhood in the north of Scotland was full of entertaining, and sometimes shocking events, and medical school in Aberdeen was a riot of fun and pranks as well as learning to be a doctor.

Frequent trips with my friends to the far north- west of Scotland opened the door to a number of adventures, and it was during my time as a medical student that I became a Christian, which was to change the direction of my life in years to come.

After four years in Aberdeen, I worked a further six years in Edinburgh before becoming second in command to transplant pioneer, Sir Roy Calne, in Cambridge. A year in the USA exposed some highly amusing differences in culture and language, and three months at the Chinese University Hospital in Hong Kong were a delight.

Finally, I became a consultant surgeon in Birmingham, only to step out of medicine to plant a church near the city centre, and teach the bible each year in Zambia and Uganda.

My midlife crisis was taking up boxing, and I fought in a number of tournaments before retiring to pursuits more appropriate to my age.



Hugh Thomson was born and brought up in Aberdeen, and graduated from medical school there in 1977. He subsequently worked as a doctor in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Cambridge, North Carolina and Hong Kong before being appointed as a consultant surgeon at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham in 1994.

He was one of the founding elders of City Church in Birmingham in 1999, and stepped out of medical practice to work full time for the church in 2002.

He is now retired and living in Birmingham.
Wellness

At the Heart of the Matter
Daniela Svampa Cowie

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 130 pages
Price: £10.99
ISBN: 9781915972835
Available from
Amazon

At the Heart of the Matter
by Daniela Svampa Cowie

In a world filled with noise and distractions, it is easy to lose sight of valuable elements. At the Heart of the Matter offers a collection of concise, impactful insights designed to inspire self-reflection and encourage mindful living. Covering a range of topics – from relationships and resilience to gratitude and personal growth – each pocket of wisdom is stripped of unnecessary fluff, allowing the readers to focus on the core message and carry it into their daily lives.

This book invites you to pause, reflect and reconnect with your true self in order to bring balance and power back into your life. Whether read in one sitting or savoured one page at a time, At the Heart of the Matter will leave you with a renewed sense of direction and bring forth the importance of making your life count.



Daniela is an integrative therapy counsellor and public speaker. Author of ‘A Reason To Love Me’, her raw heart-wrenching autobiography, ‘A Reason To Love Them – Breaking the chains of trauma’, a powerful outlook aimed at taking one’s life back, and ‘Pebbles of Inspiration’ a rich collection of positive quotes. Through her writing Daniela, an avid flag bearer of the message that nothing is insurmountable, aims to bring hope, love and strength to as many people as possible.


explore, fiction

Fergus the silent
Michael McCarthy

Fergus The Silent has won the 2023 Creative Writing Award of the Association for The Study of Literature and the Environment, the body which represents teachers and scholars of environmental writing and eco-criticism.
The chair of the judges, Richard Kerridge, leader of the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, said:
“This is a wonderful novel.
It combines a passionate and complex and at times disastrously painful love story, with a story about species loss and extinction, of a particularly ingenious and exciting kind.”

 Fergus The Silent by Michael McCarthy

In 1983 Fergus Pryng, an idealistic young naturalist, was sent to survey Lanna, remotest of all the Scottish islands, which had never been surveyed before, and discovered there something so remarkable that it would have caused a global sensation – had he disclosed it. But Fergus did not tell the world of his discovery. Instead, he devoted his life to keeping it a secret, for 17 years, sacrificing his career, his marriage and his happiness – until the threat of nearby deep-sea oil development forced the astonishing truth out into the open, with ultimately catastrophic results.

What made Fergus keep his secret, and whether or not he was right to do so, are the questions Michael McCarthy makes central to this extraordinary story, because they go to the heart of one of the key issues of our time – the increasingly tragic nature of the human relationship with the Earth. Fergus The Silent highlights this issue in a particularly acute way, in the story of one singular and solitary individual with an unquenchable love for the natural world, himself a tragic figure whose fate is unforgettable.

Published: November 2021
Hardback: 452 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781914424380
Available from Amazon

Michael McCarthy is one of Britain’s leading writers on the environment and the natural world, and has won a string of awards for his work as Environment Correspondent of The Times and Environment Editor of The Independent. As an author he has written Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo (2009) and The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy (2015) both of which were widely praised, with the latter book shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and the Richard Jefferies Prize.
Most recently he has written (with Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren) The Consolation of Nature – Spring in the Time of Coronavirus (2020) which was chosen as one of The Guardian’s Nature Books of The Year. This is his first novel..

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