A Mistake
A Novel
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In medicine, a single mistake in an otherwise spotless career can determine the rest of your life—even if the mistake was not your own
Elizabeth Taylor is a gifted surgeon—the only female consultant at her hospital. But while operating on a young woman with life–threatening blood poisoning, something goes horribly wrong. In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons' performance, her colleagues begin to close ranks, and Elizabeth's life is thrown into disarray. Tough and abrasive, Elizabeth has survived and succeeded in this most demanding, palpably sexist field. But can she survive a single mistake?
A Mistake is a page–turning procedural thriller about powerful women working in challenging spheres. The novel examines how a survivor who has successfully navigated years of a culture of casual sexism and machismo finds herself suddenly in the fight of her life. When a mistake is life–threatening, who should ultimately be held responsible?
Carl Shuker has produced some of the finest writing on the physicality of medical intervention, where life–changing surgery is detailed moment by moment in a building emergency. A Mistake daringly illustrates the startling mix of the coolly intellectual and deeply personal inherent in the life and work of a surgeon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shuker (The Method Actors) grapples with responsibility in medicine in this brisk but middling novel. Exacting, brash general surgeon Elizabeth Taylor performs emergency surgery on Lisa, a mysteriously ill 20-something, at a public hospital in Wellington, New Zealand. In a taut, medical jargon-filled scene, Elizabeth discovers pervasive infection in Lisa's organs. Elizabeth feels satisfied with the surgery despite some complications while she directed her trainee, Richard. Lisa, however, dies of sepsis less than a day later. Meanwhile, Elizabeth writes a scathing rebuke of the government's plan to publish mortality statistics for each surgeon in New Zealand. Her concerns over damage to careers intensifies when, after a tense meeting with fellow doctors and hospital administrators during which she took full responsibility for Lisa's surgical failure, she is placed on restricted duties. Elizabeth displaces her rage on home improvements and destroys relationships as she struggles to cope. Shuker's almost frantic prose builds tension, but leaves facets of Elizabeth undeveloped, like her secret relationship with Robin, a nurse at her hospital, and the narrative is weighed down with digressions comparing the mistake to the Challenger shuttle explosion. Shuker's unlikable main character evokes a visceral reaction, but the book does not reach the depths required for his heady exploration of guilt and the fuzzy line between error and malpractice.
