The Royal Free

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 is a stronghold of care for the human body and a bastion of humanism in a disintegrating world. In London, outside the office, the prognosis for the body politic is grim: there are riots in the streets. While attempting to balance a six-month-old baby, his grief, and his work with a cast of mad and lovably eccentric medical editors, he finds himself the target of a violent gang of North London teenagers.

Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller, and literary conundrum, The Royal Free is vastly entertaining while also offering a lament for the unbearable, nearly unspeakable nature of a death that comes too soon.