Terry Prone: Books by practising medics really ought to be prescribed reading

Keeping the day job does maintain a close connection with the realities on the hospital floor

The trio of young doctors — two men and one woman — in Austin Duffy’s latest novel know a different hospital to the hospital that patients know. Stock picture

If holidays are still ahead of you, and you’re looking for something other than the egregious ‘beach book’, you could hardly do better than the new one from Austin Duffy. Although Duffy’s day job is as a HSE consultant oncologist, this novel isn’t about cancer. The Night Interns is about three young aspirant doctors working in an acute hospital in Dublin. Or perhaps they should be described as “surviving,” given the level of pressure they’re under.

That pressure comes from the hours they have to work, the constantly interrupted sleep they get, and the variety and intensity of demands made of them. The two men and one woman know a different hospital to the hospital patients know: This is an institution with dingy back corridors grimly half-lit and work staircases linking floors.