A Mistake: A Novel

by Carl Shuker

Overview

In medicine, a single mistake in an otherwise spotless career can determine the rest of your life—even if the mistake was not your own

Elizabeth Taylor is a gifted surgeon—the only female consultant at her hospital. But while operating on a young woman with life–threatening blood poisoning, something goes horribly wrong. In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons' performance, her colleagues begin to close ranks, and Elizabeth's life is thrown into disarray. Tough and abrasive, Elizabeth has survived and succeeded in this most demanding, palpably sexist field. But can she survive a single mistake?

A Mistake is a page–turning procedural thriller about powerful women working in challenging spheres. The novel examines how a survivor who has successfully navigated years of a culture of casual sexism and machismo finds herself suddenly in the fight of her life. When a mistake is life–threatening, who should ultimately be held responsible?

Carl Shuker has produced some of the finest writing on the physicality of medical intervention, where life–changing surgery is detailed moment by moment in a building emergency. A Mistake daringly illustrates the startling mix of the coolly intellectual and deeply personal inherent in the life and work of a surgeon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640096554
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/29/2023
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.24(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Carl Shuker is the author of four novels, including The Method Actors, The Lazy Boys, and Anti Lebanon. The Method Actors won the 2006 Prize in Modern Letters. He works for the British Medical Journal, one of the oldest medical journals in the world. He lived in Tokyo and London for many years and now lives in his home country New Zealand with his wife, the novelist Anna Smaill, and their two children.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for A Mistake

“In A Mistake, New Zealand author Carl Shuker conveys in gorgeous, heartbreaking detail the shock of catastrophe and the ways we try to make sense of disaster after the fact . . . A Mistake wastes no time with throat clearing. From its first word we’re in the pivotal, high–stakes scene around which all else in the novel revolves . . . Shuker’s novel is the fascinating and infuriating story of the way various parties interpret and revise what they witnessed, limning events in telling ways. Shuker’s arresting prose renders the inconceivable breathtaking . . . We are reminded of why we turn to narrative in the first place—our need to know what happened and our very human, if misguided, compulsion to fashion the messiness into a discernible, knowable story.” —Maggie Trapp, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

07/22/2019

Shuker (The Method Actors) grapples with responsibility in medicine in this brisk but middling novel. Exacting, brash general surgeon Elizabeth Taylor performs emergency surgery on Lisa, a mysteriously ill 20-something, at a public hospital in Wellington, New Zealand. In a taut, medical jargon-filled scene, Elizabeth discovers pervasive infection in Lisa’s organs. Elizabeth feels satisfied with the surgery despite some complications while she directed her trainee, Richard. Lisa, however, dies of sepsis less than a day later. Meanwhile, Elizabeth writes a scathing rebuke of the government’s plan to publish mortality statistics for each surgeon in New Zealand. Her concerns over damage to careers intensifies when, after a tense meeting with fellow doctors and hospital administrators during which she took full responsibility for Lisa’s surgical failure, she is placed on restricted duties. Elizabeth displaces her rage on home improvements and destroys relationships as she struggles to cope. Shuker’s almost frantic prose builds tension, but leaves facets of Elizabeth undeveloped, like her secret relationship with Robin, a nurse at her hospital, and the narrative is weighed down with digressions comparing the mistake to the Challenger shuttle explosion. Shuker’s unlikable main character evokes a visceral reaction, but the book does not reach the depths required for his heady exploration of guilt and the fuzzy line between error and malpractice. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-07-01
Where does responsibility for a mistake lie: with a system? A circumstance? An individual?

Shuker's staccato recounting of an operating room mishap reveals as much about the iconoclastic surgeon leading the team as the doctor herself wants anyone to know: She plays thrash metal on repeat while she works, she's curt and demanding in the OR, and she's a brilliant, accomplished surgeon. The complicated aftermath of the surgical error, committed by a junior colleague, seems almost inevitable given Dr. Elizabeth (Liz!) Taylor's propensity to do things her own way despite the confines of the misogynistic medical community of the novel's setting, Wellington, New Zealand. In a parallel to the surgical story, Shuker unfolds the events leading up to the space shuttle Challenger disaster, an event Taylor uses to illustrate the implications of "massive systems failure" to her surgical students. Taylor tells them there can be simple problems, complicated problems, complex problems…or chaos. (Her own assessment of the operating room error as a "controlled emergency," not a chaotic one, is one example of her sangfroid.) A pending initiative to publish the results of medical outcomes lends additional drama to Taylor's predicament; data alone is subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation by nonphysicians, and a sole bad outcome can skew the results of years of hard-won successes. Shuker's spare narrative leaves substantial room to theorize about Taylor's emotional life as well as the ultimate assignment of blame for the surgical calamity. Scattered clues to Taylor's past allow insight into her relationship status, bisexuality, and temperament, but Shuker succeeds in providing a main character whose idiosyncratic self is most fully realized in the operating room and who has only herself to rely upon to survive the repercussions of a mistake.

A character study and a morality tale wrapped up in a medical thriller.

Kirkus Reviews