WHO COVERS THE GAP

She is good at the job. The job is still not doable. One winter will make her prove it.

Ines Carbajal, forty-four, is a respiratory consultant who never wanted to run anything. In October she reluctantly takes charge of a struggling medical division at a mid-sized city hospital, and inherits a gray box file, a rota that only works if nobody is ill, and an arithmetic that does not come out.

There is no scandal here. No conspiracy, no villain, nobody to defeat. There is a manager who is competent and constrained. A charge nurse who runs her ward better than anyone and will never be promoted. A brilliant, insufferable registrar who is right about the one thing everybody has decided to stop hearing. A young doctor who is drowning quietly, in plain sight, while everything she produces stays good. And a set of decisions, each of them defensible, which together are not.

Then, in December, a man dies on a ward that does not usually look after patients like him - and the investigation that follows becomes the spine of Ines's winter. Somewhere inside it is a single sentence she knows to be true and incomplete. Correcting it will cost her. Leaving it will cost somebody else.

WHAT'S INSIDE

- A novel about responsibility for other people's work, told from inside a handover, a bed meeting, a rota crisis and an investigation

- Two chapters from the point of view of Willa Trask, charge nurse, who keeps a hardbacked book of everything she has said and when

- A workplace rendered with unsparing accuracy and no procedural detail: illness is present here the way weather is present

- A protagonist who makes one clear mistake and is not let off it

- An ending that is neither triumph nor collapse - March comes, something small is genuinely better, and something else has been paid for it

- Entirely invented: an invented hospital, an invented city, an unnamed country, an unnamed present