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What do we reach for when our heart is broken, and reading an entire novel feels completely beyond us?

In this episode, I welcome back poetry anthologist Ana Sampson to talk about her wonderful new collection, You Can Do It With a Broken Heart, a book of poems for anyone weathering the end of a relationship.

Ana and I talk about why poetry can be particularly powerful when we’re distressed: short enough for a depleted attention span, but capable of delivering an emotional gut-punch in just a few lines. We explore the strange universality of heartbreak, from the devastation of a first teenage breakup to the grief, rage and disorientation of losing a relationship later in life.

We also discuss the five stages Ana uses to shape the collection, moving from It’s Going Wrong through I Miss You and the gloriously necessary I Hate You, before reaching Picking Up the Pieces and A New Dawn. Not because recovery is ever neat or linear, but because sometimes we need a poem that meets us exactly where we are.

Along the way we talk about reclaiming places haunted by memories, the comfort of discovering that someone else has felt what we are feeling, and why the arts may sometimes have more to offer a broken heart than conventional medicine. There’s also Wendy Cope, Edna St Vincent Millay, Derek Walcott, Sophie Hannah, the therapeutic possibilities of bedazzling, and the excellent concept of a "bedazzle and bitch” party.

A warm, funny and very honest conversation about heartbreak, poetry, friendship and the gradual discovery that, eventually, there might just be a glimmer of light again.

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In this episode of Bedside Reading, I’m joined by Emily Tammam to talk about Virginia Evans' The Correspondent, a novel told through the letters and emails of 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp. What begins as a conversation about a wonderfully prickly older woman and the lost art of letter-writing takes us into much deeper territory.

Emily is a writer, painter and speaker. She has a background in lactation support and now works across research, mental health support and children's palliative care. She Her daughter Neve was diagnosed with brain cancer and died after being supported by children's palliative care, an experience that has profoundly shaped Emily's subsequent work and writing.

We talk about writing as a way of making sense of our experiences, and about what letters might leave behind when we are no longer here. We explore Sybil's relationships, including the value of friendships across generations and the importance of the wider, chosen families who may sometimes provide something our biological families cannot.

At the heart of our conversation is grief. Emily and I discuss how the death of a child changes not just an individual but relationships across a whole family, and whether grief and trauma sometimes need to be understood as related but separate experiences. We wonder how much attitudes to bereavement have changed between generations, and what happens when loss becomes something that simply cannot be spoken about.

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This week Tara is joined by fellow GP Francesca to discuss Lisa Ridzén’s beautiful and heartbreaking novel When the Cranes Fly South.

Bo is an elderly man determined to remain in his own home, surrounded by his memories and, most importantly, his beloved dog Sixten. But as he becomes increasingly frail, his son and carers have different ideas about what is best for him.

Tara and Francesca talk about ageing, family relationships, continuity of care and the difficult balance between keeping somebody safe and preserving the things that make their life worth living. They also consider a question that sits at the heart of both the novel and good healthcare: what matters most to the person themselves?

There’s also discussion of dogs, difficult sons, wonderful carers, the joys and perils of audiobooks, and why this relatively short novel resulted in quite so many tears.

A gentle, moving book that stays with you long after you’ve finished it.