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In collaboration with Verb Wellington, we're excited to announce the launch of The Royal Free, the new novel by Carl Shuker, author of the bestselling A Mistake – which has been described as 'the novel at its visceral and emotional best' (Pip Adam), 'razor sharp and compelling’ (Kiran Dass), and ‘a masterful dissection of truth and fallibility' (Ockham NZ Book Awards). A Mistake is now a film written and directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Elizabeth Banks – coming to cinemas in October.💙 Friday 8 November, 6pm
💙 Unity Books, 57 Willis Street, Wellington
The Royal Free will be launched by Damien Wilkins.
See you there! All welcome.
For more about the book: https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/the-royal-free/
For the full Verb programme: https://www.verbwellington.nz/
Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum, The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing – by the author of the acclaimed A Mistake.
James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the ‘third oldest medical journal in the world’, the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices – the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?). His job is utterly boring, but – or so he tells himself – totally crucial: the Royal London is a stronghold of care for the human body, a bastion of humanism in a disintegrating world. In the London outside of the office, the prognosis for the body politic is bad: civic unrest is poised on the brink of riots.
Attempting to grieve for his lost young wife, while haunted by a group of violent North London teenagers in a collapsing city, James is brought to crisis.
Carl Shuker is a former editor at the British Medical Journal and the author of five previous novels: A Mistake (Te Herenga Waka University Press and Counterpoint, 2019); Anti Lebanon (Counterpoint, 2013); Three Novellas for a Novel (2008; Mansfield Road Press, 2011); The Lazy Boys (Counterpoint, 2006); and The Method Actors (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), winner of the Prize in Modern Letters in 2006. He lives in Wellington with his wife and two children.
Cover: Keely O'Shannessy
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Unity Books Wellington, 57 Willis Street,Wellington, New Zealand
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