The good doctor

When Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting, Frank is instantly suspicious.

Laurence is everything Frank is not - young, optimistic and full of new schemes.

The two become uneasy friends, while the rest of the staff in the deserted hospital view Laurence with a mixture of awe and mistrust. The town beyond the hospital is also coping with new arrivals, and the return of old faces.

The brigadier - a self-fashioned dictator from apartheid days - is rumoured still to be alive. And down at Mama's place, a group of soldiers have moved in with their malign commandant, a man Frank has met before and is keen to avoid.

Laurence wants to help - but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last. In gleaming prose Damon Galgut has created a literary thriller out of an unlikely friendship.

The Good Doctor is a gripping novelistic high-wire act.