This book is nothing if not Dickensian in range, marvelous characterization, names (Dexter Veriform, Amaranth Fillet, Dymphna O'Reilly, Agnes Crumpacker, Lawless Armstrong, Barker Kaye and Zoltan Nagy, to name but a few) and detail, detail, detail. It is a rich smorgasbord of richly told tales of primary care practice with an eye to the irony, sorrow and joy of such a practice, which has all but disappeared from the U.S. today. The medical experiences in this book represent a curious mix of 21st century technology (computers, air ambulances) and the rugged world of not-quite-blue-collar workers caught in their hardscrabble existence as farmers, miners and factory workers suffering from depression, abdominal pain, shoulder pain and old age as they tend to their quotidian ills, joys, jealousies, and properties.

Several of these stories are gems, e.g., "A English Christmas", which tells two stories: the first involves the type of plain cloth gratitude one can only experience in primary care - a grateful patient suddenly giving the physician, who'd gone to great difficulties to make a house call on a cantankerous old lady, a bottle of Australian wine; the second is the sad but highly believable encounter the same physician has with a vicar for whom all the loose ends of his disturbed life come unravelled.

A quibble: it is not clear who wrote these stories. Most likely, they are germs of stories physicians told Ms Butler. But the true provenance and authorship are not forthcoming in the Forward, Preface or Acknowledgment. Does it matter whether this is fiction, nonfiction or "faction", a la Truman Capote's In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song? Probably not. Since this is not a book that purports to be an historical account of medical care in Australia in the 1980's or an history of primary care in New Zealand, such quibbles matter not. It does bother me a little that I can't tell what is "true" medical experience related by physicians and what is fabricated, or augmented, by Ms Butler. (Since Ms Butler is not a physician, albeit an author married to one, it is more the marvel that there are very few passages that do not ring medically true.) Since this is her second such book, one can only hope she will clarify what is hers, what is theirs, and what is the felicitous marriage of both. Perhaps a less conscientiously honest author would have simply labelled this book fiction. After a few acknowledgments beforehand,  I would have.