If a doctor can perform an abortion or transgender operation I don’t understand why a patient can’t request an end of life assist.

Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. Bursting with empathy, common sense and humour, would that we could all be so fortunate as to have the author at our bedside when the time comes. I would highly recommend reading it and then discussing its contents with family members and your GP. Too much medicine and too little helping people and their families gain a realistic vision of old age and dying. Jarrett explains how we can ensure that our last years are comfortable and not a burden to us, the health care system and, most importantly, our loved ones.I want everyone at the age of seventy to discuss and document what medical interventions they would be willing to accept over their next decade or so of life. It is a bitter-sweet reflection of a life well lived but one that is courageous enough to face the realities of life and the human condition. Like many lapsed Catholics the author is sometimes guilty of imagining that a Roman Catholic understanding of how to respond to death and what religion means is the only valid (but wrong) way of being religious. He marries the importance of keeping ourselves useful with the necessity not to take ourselves too seriously. This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying.

I am interested in how modern medicine seems to have lost its way especially with excessive investigation and treatment of the very frail and elderly close to the end of their natural lives. It’s fantastic - every chapter left me reflecting on my own life, what I would like for the people I love and what I hope my children will experience. We all need to have conversation about what we want in the end and keep the conversation going with your family. And I loathe fish, can't eat lamb and must steer clear of certain other foods that make my skin itch. This book was recommended and whilst I did find it interesting in parts, generally it's a tad sad and depressing ( as it would be given the subject matter) For me, the book lacked any spiritual depth.

Anything we prepare for is so much easier to handle than becoming overwhelmed due to our lack of tools to sort things out clearly. I struggled a bit in the beginning and wondered if this was going to be another medical professional having a pop at the NHS and government and so on. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end. It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome.

I work in the NHS myself in psychology and really liked the author’s musings on how much society might over-medicalise or over-treat. My cynical side thinks it’s because keeping an old patient alive generates way more money for the medical community. This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy.But my observation is that iliving to an old age - a slow death - is as bad as the author describes. We are all going to die, at some stage, and decisions we make will inform our declining years - from 25 years on.

This wonderfully enlightening book by a doctor who cares for the dying is a plea for all of us to consider now what a good death should look like and what we’d want for ourselves.

It presents a cogent argument for an alternative approach to the end of life from the one that has seen us sacrifice quality of years for quantity. A refrain throughout the book is: "Just because a treatment can be given does not mean it should be given.