Dr Sanjay Gupta’s new novel Monday Morning takes us inside the seedier side of a working hospital. It’s the CNN correspondents first novel of fiction following his two earlier non-fiction works, Chasing Life and Cheating Death.
Monday Morning is not unlike how hospitals are depicted in a typical television medical drama, according to a review in Hyphen Magazine,
Interoffice romances, shocking diagnoses, familial strife and, of course, office politics are all weaved into the story lines involving five doctors at Chelsea General. Among the characters is Dr. Sung Park, a Korean American doctor who undergoes a personality transformation after going under the knife himself for brain surgery.
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The book does spend some time also on the doctor’s efforts to save lives. Their failures are played out and debated at the hospital’s Morbidity and Mortality meetings.
Joyce Chen writes in her review: “Gupta has had to squeeze a number of rather big-ticket events into a small period of time, which can make the narrative come off as a bit forced occasionally — even if the daily chaos is only a slight exaggeration.”
Perhaps Gupta might want to consider his stories into a series of one hour dramas that would play well after Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice.