Susan Hill Susan Hill

TB or not to be

There are dark secrets at ‘the Gwen’, a hospital for consumptives, in Linda Grant’s moving story of medical mayhem in postwar Kent

issue 29 October 2016

  • The Dark Circle

    Linda Grant

    Virago, pp. 310

If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will have hung over your childhood and youth, as it did mine, and Linda Grant’s new novel strikes many a chord. My maternal aunt had the disease, and spent months in a sanatorium like the one described in The Dark Circle, but finally had a thoracotomy (removal of a lung and seven ribs).

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