THE NEXT NEW NEW NOVEL

As some of you devoted readers know, Baby Doe is the first in the NICU series of novels about my doppelganger, the feckless Eli Kurz MD. In Baby Doe, Eli has a cameo role as the smart but overbearing and career-focused senior resident presiding over a NICU housing a newborn who creates an impossible set of life or death problems.

In the second book in the series, DiBene's Offer, it's the 1990's, and it's all about Eli's trying to reboot his faltering career at Harvard after having scanted his research. The obvious questions arise about why one chooses to do biomedical research: how to do the research; the rewards and downsides of minimizing clinical work in favor of long days in a lab; and whether one seeks fame and glory, or the joys of just making discoveries, big or small. And what if the pressures to succeed or even survive in academia are such that one takes shortcuts?

The third novel in the series, Saving Julian, is my favorite with Eli surviving the consequences once again of his less than optimal choices. Julian, a baby in the NICU, requires saving several times as does his mother, Sula, and also Eli. As Albert Camus put it, "Life is the sum of all our choices."

And now Sula's Sacrifice is nearing publication. Because of medical malfeasance, Eli has been "encouraged" to take a sabbatical in Ethiopia where he hopes a simple device may improve outcomes of newborns who are delivered outside of hospitals. Eli makes more poor choices and so does Julian's mom, Sula. Together they struggle to make things come right. Clinical research is difficult enough in the US, but even lives are at stake in this fast-paced medical love story that would make members of research review committees cringe. For those who were captivated by Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, themes of exile, medicine, and family also emerge in Sula's Sacrifice.

Here's a review from an advance reading copy: "Theft, kidnapping, ransom demands, character assassination, a sadistic Sudanese General, a supermodel turned doctor, and yes, love and redemption. Sula's Sacrifice has it all as we follow the trials and tribulations of Dr. Eli Kurz, who flees Boston to run a simple clinical trial in Ethiopia that might improve resuscitation of newborns. I had to strap myself in for the ride."

--Mark P Cohen, author of The Red Heifer post on Substack and the upcoming novel, Listening to the Echo."