A Little Unwell (Kerry Jewell, Hachette)

Kerry Jewell’s debut novel, A Little Unwell, is a candid medical drama that draws back the privacy curtain on the life of a young resident doctor working rotations at an inner-city Melbourne hospital. When Amy imagined her career, she had visions of helping people and saving lives. In reality, her days are swallowed by unpaid overtime, appeasing nurse unit managers, wrangling interns and disgruntled patients, developing a vitamin D deficiency and clinging to a hope for 3 spare minutes to scoff some cake in the break room – or for 10 minutes with her long-term boyfriend, also a doctor, before he starts his night shift. Amy’s always seen medicine as the safe bet, despite her sister, Charly, trying to convince her she’s on a torturous conveyor belt into purgatory. But after the death of her grandmother (which may or may not have been her fault), a friend’s downward spiral after losing a patient, an increase in patient-on-staff assaults, and some questionable behaviour from her boyfriend, Amy begins to unravel. Jewell, a nuclear medicine physician herself, writes with surgical precision about the confronting reality of a medical system under pressure, family politics, and the bravery it takes to start again. Fans of Samuel Shem’s The House of God, Shirlene Obuobi’s On Rotation and the hit television show The Pitt will find much to digest in this empathetic debut.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Shannon Grey is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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