The White Coat Diaries

The White Coat Diaries is Madi Sinha's debut novel, drawn from her own years in medicine. Norah Kapadia has landed a coveted internal medicine residency at Philadelphia General Hospital, the dream she has carried since her father's death. Her first day goes so badly she nearly quits.

What follows is a year of sleep deprivation, hostile patients, hospital politics, and the pressure of being the perfect Indian daughter to a mother who would rather she take a quiet lab job. Chief resident Ethan Cantor is everything Norah wants to be — steady, respected, effortless with patients — and his attention starts to feel like the one thing going right.

Then a medical error kills a patient, and Norah is drawn into concealing it. The novel sits between women's fiction and medical drama, funny in places and unsparing in others about what training a doctor actually costs.