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 the mistakes no one else notices – the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, 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.