![]() Laura’s mind overflows with the language of her creator, Emma Glass, which means she floats along on a sea of high-wire alliteration, jazzy rhythms and tactile description. This, though, is a trauma-generating war on death and despair fought for us in every city, every day. At its height, Glass’s battlefield prose calls to mind not so much a hospital soap as the literature of the trenches, the dugout and hand-to-hand combat, from the Somme to Vietnam. ![]() No wise-cracking, hard-bitten pro from some TV cast of stereotypes, Laura empathises almost to excess with her vulnerable babies and their frantic families. The visceral physicality of Glass’s writing has a shocking sensuousness about it, down to the peculiar texture and odour of the vomit. delivers a string of close-focus, high-impact scenes that blend gnawing tension and surging tenderness. Packed with echoes, assonances and internal rhymes, along with some verbal swerves and twirls that recall the prose work of Dylan Thomas (Glass also comes from Wales), her muscular language throbs with sinewy energy. Its galloping pace and breathless immediacy feel deeply, even scarily, authentic. ![]() conveys all the drama, dread, stress and (sometimes) blissful relief of a working life spent in intensive paediatric care. ![]() Whereas her debut burrowed ferociously, but lyrically, into the aftermath of a horrific attack on its young narrator, this second novel unfolds in the professional milieu she knows, and in the driven, haunted minds of the people who sustain it. ![]()
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