A huge best-seller in France with more than 600,000 copies already sold, this unique work, mixing medicinal anecdotes with a beautiful, morally complicated story, is now finally in paperback. A frank portrait of a small-town physician, we soon come to see how one doctor's empathy for his fellow creatures can be both his motivating force and his own untreatable condition. 'The author's experimental narration heightens the novel's immediacy, doing full justice to the messiness of the body and the variety of its afflictions' - The New Yorker
