The Registrar

Neela Janakiramanan

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, September 10th 2022

The Registrar follows Emma Swann through her first year as an orthopaedic resident of a private Perth hospital where her father made his own name as a surgeon and her brother Adam is in his 5^th and final year of residency. It chronicles gruelling months of relentless work with minimal support, a combination of chronic understaffing and a toxic culture in which junior staff are alternately ignored, bullied, and humiliated by those supposed to be training them. It is an approach that stresses people and relationships to destruction, and the inevitable failures put both patients and doctors at risk.

The author, herself a reconstructive surgeon, was inspired to write this novel by the death of a friend and colleague, and she paints a vivid and disturbing picture of an institution in which intimidation and abuse are normalised, even celebrated. This, on its own, provides ample drama enough even without the addition of a romantic entanglement that further strains Emma’s precarious marriage (a twist presumably intended to broaden the novel’s cross-genre appeal, although, to her credit, Janakiramanan eschews a clean conclusion to this aspect of the plot). The Registrar is an honest, confronting portrayal of a broken system.