The Royal Free: A Novel

An exuberant dark comedy about dying young, parenting through grief, and the full-on hilarity of copyediting a medical journal while the city around you burns

James Ballard is a recently widowed father to a baby daughter. And he is a copy editor tasked with saving the Royal London Journal of Medicine from the mistakes no one else notices—misplaced apostrophes, Freudian misspellings, the wrong influenza strain. This job is utterly boring but—he tells himself—totally crucial. The Royal London ...