Newly Released - Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

Amy Virshup, New York Times
September 20, 2007

ike "Grey’s Anatomy" but with less sex, this collection of linked short stories follows a quartet of aspiring doctors, Fitzgerald, Ming, Chen and Sri. At his medical school interview, Fitzgerald is asked what quality he thinks is most important in a physician. Trust, he answers. And, the interviewer asks, can we trust you? "The only way to find out is to let me in and see what happens," Fitzgerald answers. In the episodes that follow, trust in myriad forms — between doctors and patients, husbands and wives and among doctors themselves — is tested. A woman faces the delivery of her first child alone. Two characters are quarantined during the SARS epidemic. Working overnight in the emergency room, Chen is accosted by a man in the waiting room: "Are you a doctor?" he asks. "You the doctor?" Chen replies, "They keep telling me that." The writer, Vincent Lam, is himself an emergency room physician in Toronto; he won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the largest annual award for fiction in Canada, for this book.

© New York Times 2007