Abortion can change a person. But Gabriel Weston, a British surgeon-turned-writer, is concerned not with the patient undergoing the procedure but the physician performing it--and performing dozens more each week. Nancy Mullion is the doctor at hand, a gynecological surgeon facing a hospital tribunal after botching a routine termination. Exiled from her London operating theater, Nancy can't hide from family or introspection, and realizes she can't pinpoint quite why or when she selected her particular profession.
Despite its title, Dirty Work doesn't truck much in the messy battlefield of the abortion debate. It only sideswipes the politics, the protestors and even the reasons that lead patients to Nancy's table. Weston instead creates a character study as self-contained as an operating room. Her 2009 memoir, Direct Red, won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, and in her fiction the ENT doctor still displays a keen eye for the absurdities of hospital life: the hallway flower sign that actually signifies the colostomy room; how still-bleeding patients will apply lipstick when a handsome physician makes rounds.
For all its calm introspection, Dirty Work is not too tidy. Memories, like patients, "bleed out" in blunt, swift passages, and Nancy's work is described in frank anatomical detail. Weston is at her best when she rejects the black-or-white dichotomy of the abortion debate and ruminates instead on its intersections: where a girl's need for contraception meets a girl's sense of self, and where the choice of vocation meets a woman's right to choose. --Allison Williams, senior editor, Seattle Met