The Royal Free

Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller, and literary conundrum, The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake.

James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter and a medical editor tasked with saving the "third oldest medical journal in the world," the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from mistakes no one else notices—misplaced apostrophes, Freudian misspellings, and the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).

His job is utterly boring, but—or so he tells himself—totally crucial. The Royal London is a stronghold of care for the human body, a bastion of humanism in a disintegrating world.

In the London outside of the office, the prognosis for the body politic is bad: civic unrest is poised on the brink of riots. Attempting to grieve for his lost young wife, while haunted by a group of violent North London teenagers in a collapsing city, James is brought to crisis.