The Surgeon is a short, fictional story based in the (very) near future, 2030. It covers the investigation of a politician who died during routine heart surgery carried out by a prominent cardiothoracic surgeon using a robotic system/AI (called A.I.R). Perhaps the most intriguing part of this book is it’s written by a consultant ophthalmologist!
I’ve found myself rewriting this review a few times as there’s danger of completely spoiling the plot, so I apologise if it seems a bit vague. We’ve only had a few fiction books sent in to be reviewed, and they’re usually ones written by doctors. I have to say this is the first one where it was genuinely really easy to read. The plot moves fairly quickly and the author recognises that an in-depth explanation of how A.I.R development might drag out, so he instead puts the full explanation at the end as a little additional section for those interested. Anything medical is explained so you don’t have to be a medic to read this. If you decide to pick it up, I encourage you to persist past the first page. It might seem a bit much when a cannula is compared to an eel in the water, but those kinds of analogies don’t continue throughout the book.
It’s a quick read which you can flick through in under an hour and would be a good way to pass the time on a train journey for example. Pretty impressed this was kicked out by a very busy consultant during their spare time!
