Why is a professor of psychiatry and former Chief Examiner of the Royal College of Psychiatrists recommending that psychiatrists should read novels and poems? In this century of the brain surely we should be gaining our continuing professional development tokens by studying neurochemistry and molecular biology – isn't literature just a frivolous and escapist retreat from the challenge of the hard sciences? As Clare Allan's Dr Diabolus says, ‘Psychiatry is a science, pure science; I always say in its purest form one doesn't need patients at all’. ^{Reference Allan1}

This interesting book provides abundant material to justify the reading of fiction as part of a psychiatrist's lifelong learning. As the neuroscientist, Maryanne Wolf, reminds us, ‘reading enables us to try on, identify with and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person's consciousness’. ^{Reference Wolf2}

The model psychiatrist in the College guidelines is an admirable person – humane, self-controlled, objective, patient and indefatigable. As the boy scout of mental hygiene he is pure in word, thought and deed. He does not become overinvolved, reveal personal details or violate boundaries. He readily seeks a second opinion. But as Samuel Johnson wrote in The Rambler in 1750, fiction conveys ‘the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions’.

The morality tales by Pat Barker, Will Self, Alastair Campbell, Patrick McGrath and Sebastian Faulks alert psychiatrists to our own vulnerability, frailty and self-deception. These fables are more effective than hortations. We see the heroic W. H. R. Rivers in his true role as ‘double agent’; the kind but humiliated Dr Mukti using his most dangerous patient as a guided missile to destroy his academic rival under cover of seeking a second opinion; the compulsive rescuer who seduces the sister of his most vulnerable patient; the brothel habitué and voyeuristic trauma specialist; and the over-zealous researcher who distorts a case history to suit his thesis. Fiction also provides us with anti-role models like Virginia Woolf's vacuous Sir William Bradshaw who never spoke of madness: ‘He called it not having a sense of proportion’.

This book is a challenge to Harold Bloom's assertion that reading does not make us more caring. The authors show how literature helps us to see the world through the eyes of other people, to interpret their personal narrative and to enhance our sense of wonder. Thus, Professor Oyebode explicates Franz Kafka's letters which ‘show how important it is to attend to language… psychiatry is nothing if not a subject enacted within language’.

Allan Beveridge, a leading exponent of fiction for psychiatrists, argues that literature augments empathy and the ability to see the world from another person's point of view. This approach complements the professionally detached perspective of the clinician and gives us insight into the psychiatric encounter from the other side. Beveridge also shows how any narrative, whether literary or clinical, represents an individual's construction of events: the narrator, whether patient, informant or colleague, might be ‘unreliable’.

While recognising that ‘reading is not a substitute for experience’, Beveridge shows how fiction can vividly present the moral quandaries and ethical dilemmas of clinical practice. Novels and theatre encourage the reader to rehearse these situations from different perspectives.

Martyn Evans, Professor of Humanities and Medicine, confronts the purist argument that it is ‘disreputable’ to use literature in an instrumental way and concludes that a capacity for sensitive interpretation might be a by-product of reading fiction. Oyebode has contributed chapters on the autobiographical narratives of patients' lives and on poetry and psychiatry as well as Kafka's letters. Among many thoughtful analyses he explores the tension in depicting mental disintegration between the need for narrative coherence and the subjective experience of irrationality and chaos.

This wide-ranging book also covers literary accounts of death and dying, drugs and alcohol, dementia, intellectual disability and autism.

Femi Oyebode's medical students and trainees are fortunate to have a teacher who is not only a reader but also a writer and a poet.