The Children's Hospital
Chris Adrian
The Children's Hospital
A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, a young medical student finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny.
3.9 out of 5 based on 4 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
624 |
| RRP |
|
| Date of Publication |
August 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1847085788 |
| Publisher |
Granta |
| |
A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, a young medical student finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny.
The Great Night by Chris Adrian
Reviews
The Guardian
Stuart Kelly
“Chris Adrian is an American paediatrician, an oncologist and a theologian, and The Children's Hospital could only have been written by someone who is a paediatrician, an oncologist and a theologian, as well as a skilled literary practitioner. It is a profoundly disturbing novel, suffused with a weird and unsettling poetry, that asks deep questions about healing and harming.”
24/08/2012
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The Financial Times
David Evans
“… a work of ambition, imagination and strange beauty”
14/09/2012
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The New York Times
Myla Goldberg
“A story this far-flung relies upon Adrian’s sophisticated grasp of the timeworn imperative Write What You Know, which enables the narrative to achieve its supernatural heights without losing readers along the way. Adrian employs his own experience as a pediatric resident to create the vivid hospital environment … A literary work that employs the supernatural must allow magic to further its ends without permitting it to hijack the boat. The Children’s Hospital manages this at the outset, but stumbles further on. The heavy presence of angels and the increasing supernaturalism can be difficult to take ...”
15/10/2006
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The Washington Post
Elizabeth Hand
“The first half of this novel is superb. Adrian's account of the medical staff's day-to-day battles is gripping and intensely humane, despite the frank and often horrific descriptions of the disorders that brought these children to the hospital in the first place … But Adrian's carefully calibrated balance between the miraculous and the mundane begins to wobble in his depiction of the post-Thing Two world. The novel's baggy structure can't support the symbolic weight of all those angels and miracle children, who take center stage as the hospital's mortal, adult staff begins to sicken.”
10/12/2006
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