The Children's Hospital

The Children's Hospital

A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, Jemma Claflin, a medical student, finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children's Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion. *Starred Review* In Adrian's second novel, an elegant and enormously wondrous monstrosity, the world comes to an end, drowned beneath seven miles of water. All that is preserved is a solitary children's hospital and its occupants. Presiding over the apocalypse are four angels who often are indistinguishable from demons: one to chronicle and one to accuse, one to protect and one to punish. Within the floating hospital, medical student Jemma Claflin discovers that a fearsome healing fire burns within her, a fire that she uses to cleanse the hideously diseased children of their "wrongness." It is useless, however, against the greater wrongness of the rest of her ark mates, who struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy amidst the confounding swirl of the end-time. Adrian, poetically and with exacting precision, has crafted a prophetic, difficult novel of compassion and healing, but with a keen eye fixed on the damning reach of divine wrath. The scalpel's edge between grace and violence, between healing and putrefaction, can scarcely distinguish life as an obscene abomination from the miracle it suffers to be. Adrian attempts a near-impossible summit, and delivers a devastating, transformative work that is certain to burn in the minds of readers long after the final page's end of the end of the world. Ian Chipman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved The Children's Hospital has echoes of a children's book, as it takes on questions of good and evil with an earnestness rare in adult fiction, while remaining seriously fun to read; the funky everyday cohabits naturally with the miraculous. -- Los Angeles Times One of the most revelatory novels in recent memory... Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly. -- San Francisco Chronicle This novel is a singular event: Massive, recondite, often electrifying. -- Bookforum To read Chris Adrian is to take part in the exciting process of watching a talented and original writer gain mastery of his powerful gifts. -- Myla Goldberg, New York Times Book Review [Adrian] is a writer of prodigious talent who holds your heart in his hands ... And despite or because of his unlikely world view, he is irresistible. He sails into the inexplicable, seeking meaning; and the reader, gripped by curiosity and admiration, scrambles on board. Adrian's prose here is writing at its best--medical magical realism, you might call it ... We will be lucky as long as he continues to write. -- Boston Globe "Chris Adrian's life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor, his guide and interpreter, as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes. And every report he makes of that world enriches and enlarges our own sense of the world we thought we knew." --MARILYNNE ROBINSON "Chris Adrian is a novelist, a doctor, a philosopher, a literary explorer, the humble clear-eyed prophet of our time. He is an eloquent anatomist of loss, naming and labeling the bones and sinews of grief; he is a comedian dressed in sackcloth, a winking Virgil leading us through the circles of our own earthly hell. But he is ultimately a healer; the genius of his writing lies in its compassion, its ability to make what is broken whole again. To read him is to be understood: to know you are not alone in your misery, your self-doubt, your sins of pride, your wild joys, your insomnia, your madness, your desire." --JULIE ORRINGER "Chris Adrian is truly brilliant. I'm not saying this because he's a writer, and a pediatrician, and now in divinity school. I simply believe him to be a person with a unique way of processing the world around him and the ability to communicate that vision back to us in what is often a startlingly beautiful manner." --NATHAN ENGLANDER Many novelists set themselves the task of confronting the world's ills in their fiction. Fewer attempt to actually cure them, as Chris Adrian does in his second novel, The Children's Hospital, a sprawling and impassioned morality tale in which a catastrophe of biblical scale wipes out nearly all life, human and otherwise, on Earth. Adrian has an impressive CV for a young writer: The author of a critically acclaimed debut novel, Gob's Grief, and short fiction that has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, he's also a pediatrician now studying at Harvard Divinity School. All of these experiences bear fruit in The Children's Hospital,