If there was a Booker Prize for new texts on clinical genetics, then the winner this year would be a foregone conclusion. No one else could possibly come up with an entry as good as this. Somehow, squeezed in between busy careers and presumably equally demanding family lives, Helen Firth and Jane Hurst have found the time to compile the definitive hands-on guide to clinical genetics.

The authors have chosen to divide their working manual into seven sections, beginning with an introduction covering the …