The Children's Hospital
Chris Adrian's novel imagines a hospital that floats on an endless flood after the rest of the world has drowned. Inside, medical residents tend to the sick while arguing about God, sex, and whether the water will ever recede. The premise sounds like allegory; the execution is closer to a fever dream spread across six hundred pages of hospital corridors and chapel light.McSweeney's Books published it in a handsome edition appropriate to the story's scale. Adrian, a pediatric oncologist and theologian, writes with firsthand knowledge of hospitals and an uncommon willingness to ask unanswerable questions about suffering and grace. The result is a fantasy novel that refuses the consolations usually sold with the genre, including the promise that anyone will be saved.
