Awake

A groundbreaking blend of science writing and human drama, Awake takes readers inside the extraordinary world of “awake surgery” – operations in which patients remain conscious, speaking, moving, even playing music, while their surgeons remove brain tumors once thought untreatable.

On October 10, 2022, the world was stunned by the image of a saxophonist playing Love Story in a Roman operating room, as Dr. Christian Brogna delicately excised a tumor from his brain. It was not a stunt, but a revolutionary method: by keeping patients awake, Brogna and his team can map the brain’s vast network of connections with millimetric precision, reducing risk and preserving the very essence of personality – memory, emotion, creativity, and identity.

But this book is more than a chronicle of medical breakthroughs. Interwoven with patient stories are Brogna’s own: years of study, decisive encounters, flashes of intuition – and a near-death experience when meningitis left him in a coma, granting him firsthand insight into the fragile boundary between life and death.

Written with novelist Claudia Zanella, Awake is the moving, deeply human story of a surgeon who puts his patients at the center of everything, revealing the courage, resilience, and wonder of the human mind.