Book cover of The Waiting Rooms

Book description

Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman's hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.

'Combines the excitement of a medical thriller a la Michael Crichton with sensitive characterisation and social insight in a…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Waiting Rooms as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Like Green for Danger, this is a more classic mystery novel, though it is also a dystopian fiction.

The ‘hospital’ in which it is set is a facility for the elderly, who, denied access to antibiotics, wait there until, through accident or nature, they contract an infection and are allowed to die. Yet much of the novel takes place years earlier in South Africa and England, before the antibiotic crisis when the main character meets the love of her life. How we have progressed from today’s society to the society described in the book is gradually revealed, as is…

From Julie's list on evocative stories set in a hospital.

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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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