The [Too Sleep-Deprived] Night Interns | Book Review

A book review of “The Night Interns” by Austin Duffy

Austin Duffy’s The Night Interns (Granta) presents us with main characters who would inspire us little reassurance if we were their patients: younger and unexperienced doctors, some who even still carry their textbooks in their pockets, and who have been left to their own devices by the residents to safeguard the lives of patients while they go home to catch some sleep.

Set in the Ireland of our times, the novel strays from clichés created primarily in TV shows such as Grey’s Anatomy or Dr. House, with plots driven by geniuses with no need of sleep or bizarre diagnoses that tend to be miraculously solved in the last second. Instead, the book's blurbs promise an immersive narrative crafted with a Sally-Rooney-like sensitivity, dark humour, and tension. In his pages, Duffy –an oncologist himself– offers a more plausible insight into what happens in hospitals at night, when patients present new symptoms that may lead to their deaths, or when nothing happens at all. Moreover, The Night Interns throws us into a narrative that evokes the exhaustion, uncertainty and helplessness that permeates a space with so much at stake like a hospital.

Duffy’s novel begins describing a moment in which the main character, whose name…