- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate (5 Mar 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007240503
- ISBN-13: 978-0007240500
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13.2 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,234,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Quick
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
/ From the author of 'The Doctor' comes a disturbing and ghostly tale about a doctor's obsession with a mysterious comatose patient. / 'The Quick' is ideal reading group material and will be featured on the Reading Groups website. / Guaranteed review and feature coverage.
Product Description
The chilling, ghostly account of a doctor who is determined to find light in a lifeless body.
Patient DL lies motionless in a small room at the end of a hospital corridor. She has suffered massive damage to her brain, and it's not clear whether she can see or hear the world around her.
When Sarah Newman, the narrator of this ghostly tale, is charged with finding a spark of light in her lifeless body, she is drawn into a drama which extends far beyond the hospital walls. What accident befell DL to cause her such massive brain damage? Why does her family behave in such unsettling and perplexing ways? Why is DL's estranged husband visiting the patient after hours, in the dead of night? And what is troubling the narrator herself, who seems to carry a burden from her past?
As the tension builds and the strange case of Patient DL becomes known to the outside world, Sarah Newman finds herself at the heart of a personal and an ethical dilemma. ‘The Quick ‘is the thrilling account of an obsession, charged throughout with a sense of the mystery of consciousness. It heralds the arrival of a major new talent.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Quick has the feel and pace of a thriller, but is in fact a book of ideas. The plot centres on two women, Sarah, a neurobiologist whose life is almost entirely cerebral and Diane, a beautiful amateur artist who has been in a persistent vegetative state for a decade. As the woman who is all mind becomes obsessed with the other who is apparently little more than a body, their fates become intertwined. During her increasingly desperate efforts to coax a sign of consciousness from her patient, you begin to see Sarah herself as a disembodied mind trapped inside the outdated carcass of the old hospital in which she works. As the story unfolds she is forced to confront the circumstances that have shaped her. Meanwhile, Diane remains inert almost to the end - a window in which other characters see reflections of themselves - until finally and dramatically she makes herself known, giving a life-affirming vision of the powers of imagination.
Elegantly written and with remarkable insight into the intriguing world of neuroscience, The Quick is an unusual and fascinating piece of fiction.
Elegantly written and with remarkable insight into the intriguing world of neuroscience, The Quick is an unusual and fascinating piece of fiction.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I started to see The Quick as a bit of an `Aga -saga' before rapidly realising that it was more like a `Rollercoaster-ride' . In the first the ingredients are lovingly sliced up, mixed together with subtle flavouring and brought rapidly to the boil in a mouth-watering denouement . Dr Sarah Newman is a methodical scientist with no life outside her work and a suppressed adoration for her brilliant boss Professor Mezzanotte. With a vision of the world framed by a life dealing with the speechless and the sleepless in the small white rooms of hospitals, she narrates the story of a brain-damaged patient who becomes the centre of a drama. The story of this beautiful and enigmatic patient threatens to break down the controlled and understated world that Sarah Newman has spent a lifetime constructing.
But be warned, there will be no time to go off and put on the kettle, take out a slice of Victoria sponge or put the cat out - or whatever it is that people do in Aga Sagas - because this one takes place in the dead of winter in a deserted farmhouse with the wind howling in the trees. In fact the boiler has broken down and we're in a cold dark world. It's a questionable moral universe where the most appalling liberties are being taken with the near dead by their families and an uncaring healthcare system. And this is where it becomes a white-knuckle race against time, where the unsuspecting reader is haplessly drawn into the drama by the helplessness of a vulnerable patient lying prone on a bed and a clock ticking away in the background....
But be warned, there will be no time to go off and put on the kettle, take out a slice of Victoria sponge or put the cat out - or whatever it is that people do in Aga Sagas - because this one takes place in the dead of winter in a deserted farmhouse with the wind howling in the trees. In fact the boiler has broken down and we're in a cold dark world. It's a questionable moral universe where the most appalling liberties are being taken with the near dead by their families and an uncaring healthcare system. And this is where it becomes a white-knuckle race against time, where the unsuspecting reader is haplessly drawn into the drama by the helplessness of a vulnerable patient lying prone on a bed and a clock ticking away in the background....
Format:Paperback
There are plenty of books out there where academics vent their ideas about the nature of humanity. Most are cold and intractable to all but their colleagues and close followers of the area. Here, however, is a book that rehearses many of the ideas and arguments but imbeds them in a story - as such it makes them much more accessible. Read, think and enjoy.
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