A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they’ve lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, a young medical student finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children’s Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion.
Chris Adrian is the author of a previous novel, Gob’s Grief, and his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories. He recently completed a pediatric residency at the University of California San Francisco, and is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School.
To read recent reviews of The Children's Hospital, click here.
“Chris Adrian is truly brilliant. I simply believe him to be a person with a unique way of processing the world around him and the ability to communicate that vision back to us in what is often a startlingly beautiful manner.”
—Nathan Englander
“Chris Adrian’s life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor, his guide and interpreter, as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes. And every report he makes of that world enriches and enlarges our own sense of the world we thought we knew.”
—Marilynne Robinson
“Chris Adrian is a novelist, a doctor, a philosopher, a literary explorer, the humble clear-eyed prophet of our time. He is an eloquent anatomist of loss, naming and labeling the bones and sinews of grief; he is a comedian dressed in sackcloth, a winking Virgil leading us through the circles of our own earthly hell. But he is ultimately a healer; the genius of his writing lies in its compassion, its ability to make what is broken whole again. To read him is to be understood: to know you are not alone in your misery, your self-doubt, your sins of pride, your wild joys, your insomnia, your madness, your desire.”
—Julie Orringer
"The Children's Hospital brings the great promise of Gob's Grief to fruition; it probes the twined natures of death, grief, and sin with a rare combination of insight, longing, and oracular authority, all tempered by a sense of humor so black it burns. I suspect Chris Adrian will prove to be our culture's recording angel, our demon brother; and he is certainly one of my favorite authors writing today."
—Emily Barton
