Rest and Be Thankful

Reviews / Votes

Gorgeously written ... It's heartbreaking but beautiful, and perfect for escaping into -- Florence Welch Glass evokes the exhaustion and relentlessness of working long shifts, the pain, the bleeding and cracked skin that comes with endless hand scrubbing, and most poignantly, the grief of the bereaved, all in excruciating detail. There's a ghost story element too, which adds a lovely frisson to the proceedings * Evening Standard, Books of the Year * Haunting yet beautifully written. I couldn't put it down. A masterpiece -- Poppy Delevingne In Glass's trademark, lyrical style, it follows a woman on the edge - a night-shift nurse in a pediatric unit who may or may not be seeing things * LitHub, Most Anticipated Books of 2020 * Atmospheric and eerie, Rest and Be Thankful is full of Glass's poetic observations, and will leave you thoroughly haunted and entranced * Refinery29 * Blends gnawing tension and surging tenderness ... Glass's battlefield prose calls to mind the literature of the trenches. This, though, is a trauma-generating war on death and despair fought for us in every city, every day * i paper * Touching, devastating, almost absurdly pertinent ... What, Glass asks, do we expect from our caregivers, and how do we repay them for the burdens we lay on them? * Times Literary Supplement * Thrusts the reader into the pulse-raising fear, frenzy and relief of work in a paediatric intensive-care unit ... A battlefield atmosphere arises from Glass's prose as she recounts the time-stopping teamwork that aims to preserve tiny, fragile lives * Economist * Glass wants readers inside Laura's body, tasting seawater in her nightmares of drowning, feeling her limb-heaviness as she falls asleep at a friend's kitchen table. Such richness makes all of Glass' writing stand out, but this glimpse into the world of nursing feels like a true literary rarity ... A heart-wrenching and poetic look at a profession that deserves more literary attention * Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review * A slim, dreamy sophomore novel ... Glass's prose perfectly elicits the restless waking torment that drapes over Laura. The novel is visceral, and readers will keep turning the pages in fascinated dread. * Publishers Weekly * A visceral and dreamlike literary portrait of a burned-out pediatric nurse working night shifts in a neonatal ward * USA Today * The ward scenes, with their crystalline descriptions of the vertiginous business of care, exquisitely beat out the ceaseless rhythms of life on a hospital front line * Metro *