Goldblatt's Descent

Angry, satirical, hilarious and eventually heartbreaking, Goldblatt's Descent tells the story of a young, talented hospital doctor, an idealist in a very imperfect world.

A biting, brilliant, black tragicomedy of doctors, patients, lost hopes and last chances.

Malcolm Goldblatt has one last chance. Life, or his own obstinacy, has dumped him at the door of Professor Andrea Small's medical unit, where he will have the privilege of ministering to the world's most unimportant disease. But in so many ways, this unit is like all the others that Goldblatt has worked on, from Dr Madic's ferocious aversion to work, to Dr Burton's knife-in-the-back ambition, right up to the monstrous vanities of the professor herself - and that's before he even meets the patients. Soon the familiar cycle of hope and despair threatens to drag him into its eddy, and with his finger never far from the self-destruct button, the temptation to press it for what will surely be the final time begins to feel less like professional suicide and more like salvation.



Michael Honig trained in medicine and worked at a number of London's teaching hospitals. He lives in London with his wife and son.



A rollicking comic take on the NHS and a tragicomic meditation on human futility. One of the funniest - and bleakest - books I've read this year.