Summary:

In 1921, the twenty-four year-old Scottish medical graduate, Andrew Manson, takes up an assistant’s position in a small Welsh mining town. He is idealistic, but he quickly learns that his training is inadequate and that his hemiplegic employer will never return to practice. Manson must do all the work for a pittance and bad food. He befriends another assistant, the surgeon Phillip Denny, whose fatal flaw is devotion to drink. Together they solve the town’s problem with typhoid by blowing up the sewer.

Manson’s escape comes in a new job in a larger town and marriage to the equally idealistic Christine. She encourages him to continue his studies and to conduct research on the relationship between dust inhalation and tuberculosis. The results include higher degrees and international recognition, but they also bring about the wrath of the town’s antivivisectionists. To add to the gloom, Christine looses a much wanted pregnancy and the ability to have children.

The Mansons leave Wales for London, where Manson hopes to extend his research within a government agency. Quickly disillusioned by bureaucracy, he is lured into society practice and slowly abandons his ideals in exchange for prestige and wealth. Christine is increasingly unhappy, but his response is annoyance with her and an affair with a married woman. When one of his new associates botches an elective operation on a trusting patient, he realizes the colleague is nothing more than a society abortionist and that he and his new friends are little better.

He decides to sell his practice and renews contact with Denny to establish a group consulting practice "on scientific principles" in a carefully chosen Midland town. He also helps the tubercular daughter of an old friend to an unorthodox (but effective) pneumothorax in a clinic run by Stillman, an American who does not have an MD. Just as he and Christine have rediscovered joy in each other and their future together, she is killed in a freak accident. Only days later in the depths of grief, he is brought before the General Medical Council on charges of unprofessional conduct laid by his former associates. He acquits himself brilliantly and leaves with his old friend Denny for work in the Midlands.

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Sultana, a doctor who escaped her illiterate nomadic background to study and work in France, returns to her native Algeria when she hears of the death of her former lover and fellow physician, Yacine. She is treated with hostility, but defiantly stays in Yacine’s place at the clinic. Vincent, a Frenchman who is the baffled recipient of a perfectly matched kidney from a young Algerian woman, travels to the desert to explore the culture of this unknown person whose death has brought him back to life.

Sultana and Vincent meet through their common friendship with the furtive, questioning children, Dalila and Alilou. Vincent and Salah, Yasmine’s best friend, both fall in love with Sultana, but she seems indifferent to them. The violence and suspicion of the town leaders causes her to regress into anorexia and mutism, during which she is tormented by the horrible memory of the loss of her parents. Her three male friends and the village women help her to recover a sense of self worth, but she must flee when the leaders set fire to their dwellings. A glimmer of optimism can be found in the aspirations of the children and the solidarity of the women.

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Please note that in order to properly annotate this novel, the novel's surprise ending will be revealed here. Snowman--who used to be called, Jimmy--is a rare survivor of a dreadful catastrophe that seems to have been both the product and the demise of modern science. He lives in a tree, clad in rags, hiding from relentless heat and hoarding his precarious cache of food and alcohol, while he tries to obliterate consciousness and avoid contact with a peculiar race of beings, the Crakers. Through a series of reminiscences as he makes his way back to where he once worked, Snowman's past slowly advances to meet his future.

The world heated up to be uninhabitable desert and genetic engineering created more problems (and species! [pigoons, rakunks, wolvogs]) than solutions. People became increasingly reliant on artificial environments--both internal and external--while their purveyors--drug and technology firms--held ever greater but unthinking power. The world was divided into two: the rich, safe controlled spaces and the dangerous chaotic realm of the poor. Then an epidemic wiped out most of the human race.

Two friends are central to the story: brilliant but inscrutable Crake whose nerdy gift for science had a role in engineering the 'pure' Crakers and the horrifying world that they occupy; and beautiful, seductive Oryx whose regard of knowing innocence heaps scorn upon messy human desire and emotion. They are the Yin and Yang of the "constructed" world. Only at the end, the reader learns that Oryx was murdered by Crake, who was slain by Snowman. It seems that his arduous journey was simply to destroy the history of the events that he had written and left behind.

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A collection of short stories loosely connected to each other by centering on the experiences of four people from their first encounters during medical school and continuing into young middle age.

The first and third stories “Getting into Medical School, Part I” and “Part II,” are about study partners, Fitzgerald and Ming, who have trouble admitting their love for each other until she is accepted to medical school and he is not. Ming teaches Fitzgerald how to prepare successfully by passing along learning tips her physician-cousin provided her in exchange for sex. In the second story, Ming meets fellow students Sri and Chen and drifts away from Fitzgerald. In the third, he wrestles with feelings of rejection and misery as he realizes she has opted for a relationship with the more culturally “appropriate” Chen; however, her study tips pay off in more than one way when he meets Ming’s unsavory cousin at his medical school interview.

Later stories describe clinical encounters with specific cases, one of the most memorable being “Winston,” about Sri’s relationship with a paranoid person; the tale is told alternatively from the doctor’s perspective and the patient’s. in “Afterwards,” Sri must explain to a man’s wife and son, how he died suddenly at a strange hairstylist salon; the news disturbs the family who discover that the supposedly impotent diabetic had been a regular at a sex shop.

Fitzgerald and Chen become emergency physicians. Less settled, Fitzgerald tries several settings, including working for an air ambulance company. His problem with alcohol emerges from deep disaffection and brooding resentment over Ming’s callous rejection years earlier and her subsequent marriage to Chen. The problem begins to threaten his judgement and seriously compromises his health when he falls ill.

In the ironically titled “Contact Tracing” both Fitzgerald and Chen contract SARS (the latter from the former) during the (real) 2003 Toronto epidemic. They are isolated in adjoining rooms separated by glass and phone each other for support and discussion. They reminisce about Sri who has died of cancer and muse on the relevance of do-not-resuscitate orders. The outcome is both humorous and surprising.

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Ninety year old Hagar Shipley is as proud, independent, and clever as when she was a young girl growing up through the Depression and afterwards in a prairie town in Manitoba. Now in Vancouver, she suffers from arthritis, memory loss, incontinence and abdominal pain that make it impossible for her to be cared at home by her eldest son Marvin, aged 64 and his wife Doris.

She is ill and fearful but shares none of this with anyone. Unwilling to leave her house and move to a nursing home, Hagar slips away to a cottage she remembers from summers ago, and secretly find her way back to it.

On this journey, her present life continually blurs with remembrances from her past, as a self-assured "peacock" daughter of Jason Currie, a tough, disapproving Scottish Protestant store owner who values propriety, refinement and friends of social standing. Hagar defies her father by marrying Bram Shipley, an unsuccessful farmer with coarse manners. Their stormy marriage produces two sons, Marvin and John, whom she dominates. The harsh frontier life in the 1930s and the couple's incompatibilities cause her to leave her husband and go to Vancouver. Consistently Hagar's fierce independence and pride prevent her from expressing emotion or accepting weaknesses in her family, and in herself.

Eventually she is found by her son Marvin. By then she has become ill and disoriented, and is hospitalized. She is dying and must come to terms with her past and her present life and accept the death that is her future.

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When Rupert Darley, a twice married writer and teacher, shows up unannounced at his elderly parents’ home in rural Southeast England for a weekend, having just left his second wife, he has little reason to suspect that it will be the eventful weekend that it is. In only 170 pages, he is joined by his medical student daughter, Miranda (also called Milly), whose visit to her grandparents is expected by them but not by Rupert; he must come to grips with the harsh realities of aging, most especially that of his suddenly quite old and frail parents, whom he calls by their given names, Oliver and May; he and his daughter discuss for the first and most honest time their lives and those of their family; and they all must deal with the crisis of sudden unannounced illness.

Oliver is a well known architect who is stodgy and well aware of his eccentricities, tolerated but not allowed free range by May, his arthritic wife who is probably stronger in spirit than Oliver. The four of them discuss - jointly and in various permutations of groupings - a costly stair lift for May, Rupert's marriages and current (extended) mid-life crisis, Oliver's quixotic project to build a huge pyramid city complex, the vicissitudes of aging and approaching death (which is the elephant in the parlor in this book), health, illness and societal change.

Of interest to literature and medicine readers, Milly has frank conversations regarding end of life choices, to Rupert's initial dismay, with both grandparents individually and accompanies Oliver to the hospital in an ambulance when he has a heart attack at the end of the book.

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Although doctors have told her that things will get better, Jyl’s odds of surviving cancer are only five percent. She lives alone in a mountain cabin and receives cancer treatments at the hospital in town. She sleeps much of the day. “Her intestines had been scalded, cauterized as if by volcanic flow” [p 67], and Jyl continues to experience problem with digestion. She feels fatigued and is easily short of breath.

Her closest neighbors are the Workman’s, a Christian fundamentalist family of seven. They live miles away in a mountain valley near the creek. Without telephone, electricity, or indoor plumbing, they live off the land and toil day and night. Jyl starts carving small boats toting messages to send down the creek for the Workman children to find. Soon 15-year-old Stephan and 7-year-old Shayna visit Jyl. The two children bring her food that the Workman’s have hunted and gathered. They cut and stack firewood for the recluse. Jyl teaches them about geology and gives them small gemstones that her father had collected. The children’s visits revitalize the ill woman.

When Stephan and Shayna do not return to see her, Jyl is overcome by loneliness. She acknowledges that being alone is far worse than any aspect of her disease and treatment. Jyl makes the difficult trek to the Workman’s property to call on the children but finds that the place is deserted. Nothing remains in their boarded-up cabin except a stack of the small boats that she had crafted. Jyl sits outside their cabin and cries. The falling snow and silence envelop everything.          

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This novel by the Nobel-prize winning author chronicles the half century of love entwining three people: Florentino, a poet and businessman who has remained unmarried and has been in love with Fermina, who has had a long, sturdy, reasonably satisfying marriage to Juvenal, a prominent physician and one of the most illustrious men of his time. After fifty years of unrequited love, Florentino declares his love once again to Fermina, now a widow. They become lovers, finally, on a boat cruising up a river without cargo or passengers and with a phony yellow plague flag flying to avoid every port and all human contact.

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This novel is a coming of age narrative, written from the perspective of Bone, the out-of-wedlock (hence, bastard) young daughter of one of the fiercely proud, dirt-poor Boatwrights of Greenville County, South Carolina. The story moves from Bone's very young recollections of life with her waitress mother Anne and her numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins; through her mother's brief marriage and quick widowhood; to her volatile, painful marriage to Daddy Glenn, whose jealousy of Bone, combined with his own destructive evilness, leads the story to a heinous climax of sexual abuse.

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This is the wonderfully strange story of Mikage Sakurai, a young woman who has just lost her grandmother, her last living relative, and serendipitously finds a new "family" when Yuichi Tanabe and his mother Eriko invite her to live with them. The story weaves around Mikage's growing sense of safety and attachment to this unusual family; Yuichi's own coming of age issues as a young man; and Eriko's unconventional life as a nightclub owner . . . and the fact that she was formerly Yuichi's father.

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