THE SURGERY AT COLDBROOK

Thirty years. One town. One doctor who never once said the right thing at the right moment - and stayed anyway.

In 1979, Dr Ada Quillan gets off the bus in Coldbrook, a farming town of four thousand people, in the wrong shoes, to take over a single-handed practice from a man who ran it for forty-one years and died in his chair. The waiting room has eleven chairs of four different kinds, and the town spends the first spring quietly deciding what it thinks of her.

The Surgery at Coldbrook is a novel in sixteen linked stories, one from each of sixteen years, following Ada from that first Monday morning to the day she hands over the keys. A house call through a drift eight feet deep. A birth in a farmhouse kitchen at dawn. The man who comes every Tuesday with nothing whatever wrong with him. The worst-liked man in the valley, and what the town does when it finds out he is dying. A summer when everybody knows the wrong story and only the doctor knows the right one. And one Wednesday in July 1987 that Ada Quillan never puts down.

Funny in the way medicine is actually funny - deadpan, human, and never at a patient's expense - and unsentimental about everything except the people, this is a book about ordinary lives taken seriously, and about what it costs to be the fixed point a whole town moves past.

What's inside:

- Sixteen self-contained stories that build into one life, 1979 to 2009

- A town that is the second main character, where children grow up and come back as parents

- A receptionist who runs the medicine in that valley for thirty-five years and never once repeats a word she is told

- A doctor who is short-tempered, occasionally wrong, and never let off the hook by her author

- Warmth without sugar, grief without spectacle, and a great many cups of tea