Lam's debut collection, a Canadian best-seller, unblinkingly captures the angst, personal and professional, of four University of Ottawa med students as they wend their ways from classroom to residency. The trials of Ming, Sri, Chen, and Fitz ricochet from heartbreaking to darkly humorous with precious little downtime in between. Alternating omniscience and the first-person musings of Chen, Lam uses the stories to plumb the four's good, bad, and ugly characteristics. Ming, the only woman, and Fitz try to sublimate and end up sabotaging their love for one another as they study for exams; Ming moves on. Sri becomes so personally attached to patients that at one point he begins to wonder whether it is he or a paranoid patient who is the true psychotic. Although Chen makes a Herculean effort to maintain tight control over his own humanity, he, too, struggles to keep private concerns separate from concomitant professional life-and-death decisions. Lam won a richly deserved Giller Prize for this tender, grisly, sad, funny, illuminating book.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist

Winner of Canada's Giller Prize, Lam puts all the sex, and death and sleep deprivation crucial to any hospital drama in his debut story collection about doctors in the making. Thankfully Lam, an emergency room physician, looks beyond blood and guts to examine the conflicted hearts and minds of the four medical students sleepwalking their way through the required tests, dissections and all-night emergency room shifts. The stories trace an almost endless stretch of education and service that puts their stamina and skills to the test: Fitz (short for Fitzgerald) has a not-so-secret drinking problem, the fallout from which that lands him an unexpected job; Ming, the main cast's only woman, has a cold scientist's outlook that both aids and hinders her; Sri's heart breaks for anything that comes near his scalpel-be it a tattooed cadaver or a rambling psychotic; and dispassionate Chen struggles, like Sri, to balance compassion with his desire to succeed. The stories' quiet strength lies not in the doctors' education but in Lam's portrayal of the flawed humans behind the surgical masks. This collection made a big splash in Canada, and, as Weinstein Books' first title, is poised to do the same in the U.S. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This collection of linked stories revolves around four young multicultural Canadian medical students-Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri-as they attempt to balance their lives with the taxing demands of classes and residency in a highly charged emergency room. They deal with patients' ailments, from hiccups to a fatal heart attack in a massage parlor; in this case, the doctor, when talking with the family, has to find a "balance of professing humanity without invading privacy." Some stories ramble along with little action-one features the romance between Fitz and Ming, their breakup, and her eventual marriage to Doctor Chen-but most are action packed and insightful, including a psychological thriller about a patient who believes he has been poisoned by the neighbor who's secretly in love with him and another tale about an outbreak of SARS in the hospital that forces Fitz and Chen to come to terms with the possibility of their own deaths. Written in a straightforward manner and including a helpful glossary of medical terms, this is a good addition to every fiction collection.-David A. Beron?, Plymouth State Univ., NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A searing, perfectly paced set of linked stories that explores the careers and relationships of four Toronto doctors. Ming, Chen, Fitzgerald and Sri are young physicians whose lives intertwine both casually and intimately as they navigate the painstaking (and often painful) road to becoming physicians. We first meet Ming and Fitzgerald in Ottawa as they are studying for their pre-med exams and cautiously entering a relationship doomed by Ming's career-obsessed immigrant parents, the ghosts of abuse by her older cousin and, above all, the knowledge that Ming will be accepted to medical school and Fitzgerald will not. He does follow her, eventually, but not before she has linked herself with a more appropriate boyfriend, her lab partner, Chen. The tension between the characters pales, though, when they graduate and begin their careers. Each must face situations that test their abilities, their integrity and their strength. A paranoid mental patient, for example, who is obsessed with his neighbor and also convinced that she is trying to poison him, causes Sri to momentarily doubt his own sanity. And Fitzgerald wonders how to care, both physically and mentally, for a hostile patient brought to the hospital in shackles by unsympathetic police officers. When Sri is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the tables turn on him, and his role as a life-saver ironically becomes futile when he cannot save his own. The stories culminate in a health crisis of a much larger scale, when Fitzgerald contracts the SARS virus from a patient, and then passes it to Chen, who examines him. The two wait in quarantine, once romantic rivals, now reliant on one another, and suddenly their profession seems to be at once pointless and more important than ever. Tender insight into the fascinating emotional and social implications of a career that is, inherently, so much more than a job. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

IN an author's note at the beginning of "The Pirate's Daughter," Margaret Cezair-Thompson promises her readers a "tropical adventure." She evokes spectacular shipwrecks and deserted islands, infamous buccaneers and glamorous celebrities. And the story that follows makes good on these promises. The novel fictionalizes an episode in the life of Errol Flynn, the scandal-plagued, womanizing movie star whose sailboat capsized off the coast of Jamaica during a hurricane in 1946. Beginning with this very real drama, Cezair-Thompson tells the tale of two imagined women: a beautiful Jamaican teenager Flynn seduces during his time on the island and the daughter she bears him but whom he never cares to know. Cezair-Thompson's objective is, she claims, to give voice to those whose absence she'd always felt in the 18th- and 19th-century adventures she'd been fascinated by in her childhood. Noting that "there weren't any Jamaicans in those stories," she suggests that "The Pirate's Daughter" represents, at least in part, an attempt to right this wrong. Set mainly on Navy Island, a previously uninhabited islet near the town of Port Antonio that was actually once owned by Flynn, the novel invents the stories of Ida Joseph, Flynn's star-struck teenage paramour, and Ida's daughter, May Josephine Flynn, the child born of their affair. Ida's humiliating and selfdestructive passion for Flynn is at the heart of a narrative that focuses on a host of romantic minidramas involving the glamorous expatriates who make up Flynn's entourage. Engaged in a love-hate relationship with Jamaica and its people, these bored, wealthy foreigners drink to excess and cultivate small feuds. And, it turns out, a good number of them also hope to seduce Ida - and later her daughter. Disappointingly, neither Ida nor May manages to escape this typecasting as the exotic other, the object of desire. Despite her mother's efforts to keep her from growing up "vain and stupid," Ida often seems just that, using her youth and beauty to seduce Flynn and later his friend, an Austrian baron, since only their attentions "fit the regal idea she had of herself." Her infatuation with Flynn, rather than illuminating the emptiness of his world, merely flattens into a frustrating and predictable portrait of unreflective narcissism, both his and hers. Ida's daughter, May, fares little better. Though less conceited than her mother, she grows up to become equally preoccupied by the jet setters and longs to find a place in their midst. At one point, while dating the flashy son of a British aristocrat, she allows herself to gloat : "Here she finally had a boyfriend, not just any boyfriend but one of the most desirable, popular boys around. She was being invited to go places. ... It was very gratifying to be known as Martin Fitzwilliam-Grey's girlfriend." When Martin sleeps with May, proposes marriage, but then dumps her because she's "colored and illegitimate," it's hard to summon much pity for her. What little the reader-does feel is further dissipated when May becomes involved with Martin's father, a man 40 years her senior. Ida and May and the foreigners in Flynn's circle are too self-absorbed to be sympathetic or even particularly interesting. And the other Jamaican characters - whose stories are far less salacious, less glamorous - serve mainly to suggest certain background issues. The treatment of Ida's dark-skinned mother, the common-law wife of Ida's Lebanese father, raises the subject of class and colorconsciousness in the Caribbean. Reggae culture is represented by May's childhood friend Derek. Ida's grandmother is a Maroon, a member of a community whose ancestors were runaway slaves. While to some extent these characters layer and complicate Cezair-Thompson's fictional universe, they remain on the fringes of the narrative. As May grows up, the novel moves into the early years of Jamaica's independence, a period of great political unrest. But although this turbulence comes increasingly to the fore, even providing the catalyst for the novel's denouement, it arrives too late to lift the story from its mundane preoccupations. This soap-operatic portrayal of Jamaican women falls far short of Cezair-Thompson's goal. If indeed this is a tale about women scorned and, by extension, about a people scorned - unheard by history - then one might wish for those women to be of greater substance. Ultimately, though, the characters in "The Pirate's Daughter" are much like Navy Island itself. They exist at a remove, so absorbed in their fantasy-driven interactions with one another that they fail to take notice of the wider world. They seem content, to borrow Ida's description of herself, "to be there and alluring like the view, like the sea." Kaiama L Glover teaches French literature at Barnard College.