Insomniac City

304pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99, ebook £11.51

“What are your wishes, Dr Sacks? How would you like to pass?” Those words, from a hospice nurse to the great writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, come at the end of this memoir by his lover. By the time they arrive, you can’t bear for him to disappear, as he eventually did in August 2015. But the rest of Hayes’s book has a different unbearable quality: you long to go back to Sacks’s own words, and not see him treated as the kind of specimen he himself might have observed with more insight. Gaby Wood