Doctors and Friends

Hannah, Compton and Kira met in medical school and have kept one promise ever since: once a year, wherever life has scattered them, they take a holiday together. The year they meet in Spain, a fast-moving new virus — the artiovirus — is already loose in the world, and the vacation is the last ordinary thing any of them will do for a long time.

Compton returns to an emergency department in a New York City she no longer recognises, and to a personal loss that reshapes everything after it. Hannah, an ob-gyn in San Diego, finally becomes pregnant after years of trying, just as the disease reaches her city. Kira, an infectious disease physician at the CDC in Atlanta, finds herself at the centre of the national response, making decisions that will be second-guessed by everyone who has never had to make them.

Kimmery Martin — herself a former emergency physician — wrote this novel before COVID-19, and tells it in three strands, Before, During and After, that keep circling back to the friendship holding these women together while the world comes apart.