Duffy, Austin – The Bell Bookshop

The night interns

Emma — Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Stylish, mordant, and pitch-perfect – I read it in one sitting. If Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney had been junior doctors they might have come up with something like this” – Gavin Francis, author of Recovery—Intravenous lines, catheters, bodies in distress, wounds: three young surgical interns working the night shift must care for – and keep alive – the influx of patients, while frightened and uncertain about what the night will throw at them. The Night Interns beautifully conjures the alien space of the hospital wards and corridors through the viewpoint of one of the interns, as he comes to terms with the bodily reality of the patients and the bizarre instruments of healing. Equally unsettling for the inexperienced junior staff are the dysfunctional hierarchies of the hospital workplace. Under intense pressure and with very little sleep, the interns become inured to their encounters with sickness, all the while searching for the meaning in their work.By turns moving, shocking, and darkly funny, The Night Interns fizzes with nervous energy, forensic insight and moral tension, as it evokes life and death on the frontline.

The Night Interns

Emma — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“Stylish, mordant, and pitch-perfect – I read it in one sitting. If Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney had been junior doctors they might have come up with something like this” – Gavin Francis, author of Recover—Intravenous lines, catheters, bodies in distress, wounds: three young surgical interns working the night shift must care for – and keep alive – the influx of patients, while frightened and uncertain about what the night will throw at them. The Night Interns beautifully conjures the alien space of the hospital wards and corridors through the viewpoint of one of the interns, as he comes to terms with the bodily reality of the patients and the bizarre instruments of healing. Equally unsettling for the inexperienced junior staff are the dysfunctional hierarchies of the hospital workplace. Under intense pressure and with very little sleep, the interns become inured to their encounters with sickness, all the while searching for the meaning in their work.By turns moving, shocking, and darkly funny, The Night Interns fizzes with nervous energy, forensic insight and moral tension, as it evokes life and death on the frontline.

Ten Days

Emma — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

‘Austin Duffy’s uniquely dry, laconic style adds a subversive and compelling charge to this moving and intense story of the relationship between a father and daughter. A terrific novel’ William BoydWolf travels to New York with his daughter to scatter the ashes of his recently estranged wife, Miriam. Buffeted by the loss, his fraught relationship with his daughter and the antagonism of Miriam’s conservative Jewish family, Wolf is also coming to terms with a burgeoning concern of his own: growing dislocations in his mind, and the hollowing out of his memories.Set across the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Ten Days is a tender, nuanced and beautifully crafted story of a father’s reckoning with his daughter and a profound, compelling meditation on family, time and the bonds of marriage.’An absolutely beautiful book about time and mortality, love and memory, in which heartbreaking sadness and dry humour are held in exquisite tension’ Carys Davies