I write historical crime fiction, and my latest novel is set in a hospital, a real place, now closed. The South London Hospital for Women and Children (1912–1985) was set up by pioneering suffragists and women surgeons Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley (the first woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons) and I recreate the now almost-forgotten hospital in my book. Events take place in 1946 when wartime trauma still impacts upon a society exhausted by conflict, and my book choices also reflect this.
I came to this murder mystery having fallen in love with the wonderful 1946 British film adaptation starring Alistair Sim and Trevor Howard, only to find that the book was as good, if not better.
As a crime fiction writer myself, I admire Brand’s perfect plotting, using a small cast of characters in a semi-enclosed setting, as well as her highly unusual but completely believable method of murder. She evokes the wartime hospital setting so well that I felt myself to be in the little Army hospital in the Home Counties during the Second World War.
Her characters are people of their time, "doing their bit" for the war effort, but from differing backgrounds and with different motives. She seems to capture the wartime spirit effortlessly, something I know from experience is not effortless at all. This is a small but perfectly formed gem of a mystery.
This Golden Age masterclass of red herrings and tricky twists, first published in 1944, features a tense and claustrophobic investigation with a close-knit cast of suspects.
"You have to reach for the greatest of the Great Names (Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen) to find Christianna Brand's rivals in the subtleties of the trade."
—Anthony Boucher in The New York Times
It is 1942, and struggling up the hill to the new Kent military hospital Heron's Park, postman Joseph Higgins is soon to deliver seven letters of acceptance for roles at the infirmary. He has no idea that the…
I love Michael Ondaatje’s prose; that is reason enough to read this book, but the Booker Prize-winning novel is also filled with mystery. Set in an Italian villa–the Villa San Girolamo, a real place–which is being used as a field hospital at the end of the Second World War and with a small cast of characters, it resembles a classic mystery story, but this is far more.
Each character’s history is gradually revealed to the reader, focusing on the "English Patient," a man burned and bandaged beyond recognition and unable to recall who he is, but whose memory returns to him in sporadic bursts when he is read to from his copy of Herodotus.
In this narrative, the stories of the other characters are wound with consummate skill as we learn how the English Patient came there. A novel about memory, love, and the desire for survival, its central image is the desert, dry, clean, and unknowable. I loved it.
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.
Miranda falls in love with her dream house but soon discovers it's an affair with complications. A lot of them. Rosewood is a centuries old, tumble-down, gambrel roofed charmer located in an isolated, coastal corner of Virginia referred to as "strange". Known for long-standing and antiquated customs, an almost indecipherable…
I loved this book for its humanity and compassion, as well as its consideration of the impact of war on the individual combatants and those who choose to try and heal them.
Another wartime novel, this time World War One, it is set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, a real place, with many real, historical characters. Its central relationship is between the poet Siegried Sassoon and his psychiatrist, W. H. R Rivers, a British neurologist who experimented with treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Sassoon’s publicly stated reservations about war echo those of Rivers, who struggles with healing patients only to send them back to the front.
It raises questions about masculinity and manliness, honour and truth, and does so without seeming doctrinaire or didactic. It shows a society, as well as individuals, traumatized by war. I will read it and the subsequent novels in the trilogy again.
"Calls to mind such early moderns as Hemingway and Fitzgerald...Some of the most powerful antiwar literature in modern English fiction."-The Boston Globe
The first book of the Regeneration Trilogy-a Booker Prize nominee and one of Entertainment Weekly's 100 All-Time Greatest Novels.
In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back…
This book’s celebration of rebelliousness of spirit and anti-institutionalism is why I like it.
Set in a psychiatric hospital, like Regeneration, its medical staff are closer in spirit to Dr. Yealland in that book, who prefers inflicting pain in order to cure than to the humane Dr. Rivers. I enjoyed the humour and the scandalous behaviour of McMurphy, the sane con-man in the asylum who battles the authoritarian and controlling Nurse Ratched. It is very much in the spirit of the anti-establishment 1960s when it was written.
Other inmates rebel too and draw down Ratched’s ire upon themselves, leading to suicide, and McMurphy attacks Ratched because, however rebellious, he cannot stomach this tragedy. There is a sad and bleak end for him, as ‘authority’ wins out. The ending is one of hope, but not for McMurphy. Like the other books on my list so far, this, too, was filmed.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them…
My book is a collection of monthly Editor-in-Chief letters to the readership of World Neurosurgery, a journal that I edit. Each essay is short and sweet. The letters were written for neurosurgeons but have been re-edited so that they apply to all human beings. They cover topics such as leadership,…
Like Green for Danger, this is a more classic mystery novel, though it is also a dystopian fiction.
The ‘hospital’ in which it is set is a facility for the elderly, who, denied access to antibiotics, wait there until, through accident or nature, they contract an infection and are allowed to die. Yet much of the novel takes place years earlier in South Africa and England, before the antibiotic crisis when the main character meets the love of her life. How we have progressed from today’s society to the society described in the book is gradually revealed, as is the narrator’s part in it. There are also mysterious happenings in the facility.
This is a vividly told tale set in an all too believable near future with restricted access to life-saving drugs. I admire the clever conceit and the intricate interweaving of past and present and was caught up in the main character’s experiences.
Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman's hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.
'Combines the excitement of a medical thriller a la Michael Crichton with sensitive characterisation and social insight in a timely debut novel all the more remarkable for being conceived and written before the current pandemic' Guardian
'STUNNING and terrifying ... The Waiting Rooms wrenches your heart in every way possible, but written with such humanity and emotion' Miranda Dickinson
'Chillingly close to reality, this gripping thriller brims with authenticity…
This thrilling historical crime novel is set in 1946 at the South London Hospital for Women and Children, a hospital run by and for women. In the coldest winter on record, rationing and shortages make life grim as Britain struggles to transition to civilian life. Yet, the building blocks for a new society are being put in place.
When a nurse is found murdered behind a locked door, two women from the hospital refuse to believe the police’s theory that a vagrant is the killer. Their investigation means they must identify a man who had a midnight assignation with the nurse, but their search for the midnight man leads them both into darkness and danger.
In the first century, Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -…
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when…
