Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

Dirty Work follows the tribunal of young doctor Nancy after performing an abortion leaves her frozen and unable to help the patient bleeding to death before her. Abortion debate tends to focus, understandably, on the woman having the procedure, but Weston flips the focus on to the doctor and the choices they are faced with in performing this socially divisive surgery.

Nancy is an introvert, entirely focused on succeeding as a doctor, and the first person narrative provides an unemotional yet thoroughly engaging account of her experiences. The narrative jumps between the trial and events in Nancy’s earlier life as she attempts to fathom how she came to be abortion provider. Nancy believes her work to be the most important thing she has done in her life, and yet she is isolated from colleagues who won’t speak to her and forced to conceal her work from others – and is starting to lose focus in theatre.

Weston herself is a qualified surgeon and the book builds to the description of what Nancy has never spoken of – what it is like to perform an abortion. Those three pages contain extremely powerful prose – bold, unrelenting fact – and just as the experience stays with the doctor, it stays with the reader. [Rowena McIntosh]