The Royal Free

An exuberant dark comedy about dying young, parenting through grief, and the full-on hilarity of copyediting a medical journal while the city around you burns

James Ballard is a recently widowed single father to a baby daughter. And he is a copy editor tasked with saving the Royal London Journal of Medicine from the mistakes no one else notices-misplaced apostrophes, Freudian misspellings, the wrong influenza strain. This job is utterly boring but-he tells himself-totally crucial. The Royal London is a stronghold of care for the human body and a bastion of humanism in a disintegrating world. In London, outside the office, the prognosis for the body politic is grim: there are riots in the streets. While attempting to balance a six-month-old baby, his grief, and his work with a cast of mad and lovably eccentric medical editors, he finds himself the target of a violent gang of North London teenagers.

Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller, and literary conundrum, The Royal Free is vastly entertaining while also offering a lament for the unbearable, nearly unspeakable nature of a death that comes too soon.