A Symphony for Shelbie

Crossing music and medicine in a hybrid narrative–part memoir, magical realism, medical reporting, and autofiction–set primarily at a great teaching hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and a famed music venue in the Berkshires (also of Massachusetts), A SYMPHONY FOR SHELBIE vividly portrays a charismatic, Greek-born pediatric oncologist, Giannoula Lakka Klement, whose pioneering form of a chemotherapy administration called metronomics prolongs for four years the life of a teenaged patient, Shelbie Murphy, whose inspiring spirit prompts the novella-length book’s benediction-like promise of grace.