I’d never heard of Henry Marsh before seeing him give a talk at the Literature Festival in Cheltenham. He spoke for an hour on his career as a brain surgeon, of the life-saving operations and the tragic cases where his patients died, sometimes due to his mistakes. At first I was shocked how he could talk so openly on his own failings, but after reading this wonderful book you realise Henry Marsh is just like you and I, he makes mistakes and he doesn’t shy away from talking about them.

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘It’s not brain surgery’. But what must it be like to drill into the skull and operate on the brain, knowing that one small mistake can have the most catastrophic consequences? In this stunning book Henry Marsh explores the ethical issues of surgery, the miraculous operations where he saved people from death’s door and the heartbreaking ones that ended in disaster. In one chapter, he visits a nursing home dedicated to caring for patients with severe brain damage. “The doors were all open and through the doorways I could see the motionless forms of the patients in their beds,” he writes. “To my dismay I recognised at least five of the names.” These are patients that, in Marsh’s own word, he “wrecked” in operations that went terribly wrong.

Dr Henry Marsh was a senior consultant at St. George’s Hospital, in London. He helped pioneer surgery in which patients are kept awake, under local anaesthetic, so that they can converse with their surgeons while being operated on. Throughout his career he has operated on thousands of people suffering with the most horrendous medical issues, and even though he’s been responsible for saving countless lives, it’s the ones that he couldn’t save that he remembers most.

Not once does Henry Marsh try to deflect blame, he’s a man who takes responsibility for his mistakes. He writes that, after one operation, “I told them (the family of one of his patients) to sue me. I told them I had made a terrible mistake.” As he so often reminds us, operations on the brain carry grave risks.

However much Dr Marsh talks about the detachment surgeons must have with their patients, it’s clear how much he cares for them. Many of the most difficult moments he recounts as conversations with patients who are faced with the hardest decision a human being can face – agree to an operation knowing the chances of success are slim or live the rest of their life knowing there’s a ticking time bomb inside their head that could go off at any moment.

In one chapter we learn about Henry’s work abroad. Not at some private surgery where he was paid fortunes, but a dilapidated soviet hospital, where he gave up his free time to educate inexperienced neurosurgeons and save the lives of dozens of Ukrainians whose healthcare system is at breaking point. This was all during his annual holiday, he wasn’t paid a penny.

Rarely have I enjoyed a book more than this superb exploration into the life and work of one of Britain’s leading brain surgeons. You don’t need any interest in medical procedures to enjoy this book, this is a story of a truly heroic man and his constant battles, both physical and mental, in one of the hardest jobs in the world.