D M

Meet Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead. After inheriting a highly specialised and highly peculiar medical practice, Dr Helsing spends her days treating London's undead for a host of ills: vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights and entropy in mummies. Although barely making ends meet, this is the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta's dreamed of since childhood. But when a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead alike, Greta must use her unusual skills to keep her supernatural clients - and the rest of London - safe.

'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and what it all means. Ranging from the personal to the sublime, each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.