Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Royal Free

The Royal Free

Shuker, Carl

Paperback

Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1640097058
ISBN13: 9781640097056
Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
Published: Jun 17 2025
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
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 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.

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