Father Michael's Lottery: A Novel of Africa - Hardcover

Steyn, Johan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 097105987X ISBN 13: 9780971059870

Publisher: Schaffner Press, Inc., 2007

Synopsis

A beleaguered doctor and his staff struggle to maintain a hospital in a remote, rural community on the front lines of the African AIDS epidemic in this inspirational and life-affirming novel. The hospital and its patients do battle against meddlesome superiors, find eccentric saviors from the village, and provide readers with an unflinching look at the human cost of ignorance and apathy. The good doctor's daily struggles for the people, land, and wildlife of Africa tell a story of humor, realism, and compassion.

About this title

About the Author:

Johan Steyn is a medical doctor who works and travels extensively in Africa, preferring to live and practice in the continent's most remote corners.

From Publishers Weekly:

Steyn's fine South African import debut deals with the ravages of the big disease and bottom-line–oriented health care in southern Africa. Protagonist Dr. John Morgan toils at a remote hospital in an unnamed southern African country at the dawn of the 21st century. Retroviral drugs are prohibitively expensive, and a cynical but bighearted Morgan is constantly at odds with his boss, Superintendent Holmes, a typically penny-pinching, arrogant hospital administrator. Morgan's ragtag team of surgeons perseveres in the most deplorable conditions, dealing in doses of gallows humor to leaven the strife the staff and dying patients face. Mr. B, a well-connected and sympathetic businessman, organizes a massive fund-raising beerfest and gives Morgan the proceeds, but even this large sum can only cover two years' worth of drugs for six patients. Enter Father Michael, the local priest for more than three decades, who offers Morgan some down-to-earth counsel and proposes a lottery to determine who of the suffering scores gets treated. By turns tragic, startling and humane, Steyn's medical epic dramatizes how poverty-stricken people struggle in a harsh land with a harsher disease. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Schaffner Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 097105987X
• ISBN 13: 9780971059870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 424