Everything is True

Chosen as a Book of 2022 by the Guardian
'A stand out' Sunday Times
'Startlingly honest and devastatingly good' Rachel Clarke, Guardian
'Brilliant' Observer

'The most powerful and evocative account of working through the pandemic that I have read' Adam Kay

'A laser guided insight into what's been happening in hospitals during the pandemic laying bare what we were all clapping for ... Beautifully written, brutally honest' Jo Brand

From the frontlines of the NHS, the story of a junior doctor's love, loss and grief through the Covid-19 crisis

In early 2020, junior doctor Roopa Farooki lost her sister to cancer. But just weeks later, she found herself plunged into another kind of crisis, fighting on the frontline of the battle taking place in her hospital, and in hospitals across the country.

Everything is True is the story of Roopa's first forty days of the Covid-19 crisis from the frontlines of A&E and the acute medical wards, as struggling through her grief, she battles for her patients' and colleagues' survival. Working thirteen-hour shifts, she returns home each evening to write through her exhaustion, chronicling the devastating losses and slowly eroding dehumanisation happening in real time on the ward.

At once an unflinching insider's account of medicine in the time of coronavirus, and the devastating story of a sister's grief, Everything is True is an exhilarating memoir of holding on to that which makes us human against insurmountable odds.

'An extraordinary writer … Beautiful, heartbreaking, brilliant, furious and oh-so-honest - an amazing read' Kate Mosse

'A powerful, honest, angry, vivid book ... It will undoubtedly have a big impact ... and finds absolutely the right route through the personal, the political, the angry, the sad, the mundane' Alice Jolly

'An eloquent testimonial of grief and fury through the first forty days of the Covid crisis – Farooki's urgent, fragmentary diary of life on the wards conveys the fear, confusion and uncertainty of those first weeks with singular brilliance' Gavin Francis

About the Author

Roopa Farooki is a writer and junior doctor for the NHS. She is the author of six literary novels that have been translated into over a dozen languages, and a series of middle-grade children's books for Oxford University Press. Her writing has been awarded the John C. Laurence Prize and an Arts Council Award, and listed three times for the Women's Prize. She is also a lecturer on the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, and the Ambassador for family for Relate, the counselling charity. In 2020 she was awarded the Junior Doctor Leadership Prize from her NHS Trust, for her work during the Covid pandemic. @RoopaFarooki