Book excerpt: 'Gorgeously written ... It's heartbreaking but beautiful, and perfect for escaping into' FLORENCE WELCH 'Haunting yet beautifully written. I couldn't put it down. A masterpiece' POPPY DELEVINGNE Laura is a nurse in a paediatric unit. On long shifts she cares for sick babies, carefully handling their exquisitely breakable bodies. Laura needs a rest. When she sleeps, she dreams of drowning; when she wakes, she can't remember getting home. And there is a strange figure dancing in the corner of her vision, with a message, or a warning. '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 '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 '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