The Last Ward

Scotland, 2037. A machine has learned to cure almost everything.

Cancer, heart disease, dementia: gone, in six weeks, free at the point of use. The hospitals have emptied. The waiting lists have vanished. And on a February night in Glasgow's east end, nurse Eilidh Rennie sits with the last patient on the last hospice ward in the country, and then switches off the lights.

She has sat with more than three thousand dying people. Now there is nobody left to nurse.

Her husband died eleven months before the cure could reach him. Her healthy ninety-one-year-old mother does the crossword at the kitchen table every morning and asks strange questions at tea. Her son is twenty-nine and still sleeping in his childhood bedroom, because nobody dies any more and so nothing ever comes free.

But people do still die. The very old, who simply stop. The ones the cure does not work on. The ones who refuse it. And, Eilidh begins to suspect, a great many more that nobody is counting.

Before long her phone is ringing again. She is sitting at kitchen tables in Dennistoun and croft houses on the west coast of Lewis, teaching families who have never watched anybody die how to do it well. Then a young man from Easterhouse with a perfectly curable cancer tells her the cure has turned him away. And her mother tells her something she is not ready to hear.

Warm, funny and quietly devastating, The Last Ward is a novel about the people a miracle leaves behind, about the difference between being cured and being finished, and about a nurse who discovers that the job was never really about the illness at all. From the author of What Was Left Behind and The Long Dark.