“The sparse quiet of his aging grandfather’s cabin in northern Alberta; the raw chaos of a Toronto inner-city ER; the unceasing challenges of establishing an emergency medical facility in Addis Ababa – James Maskalyk, in Life on the Ground Floor, deftly connects these three worlds that delineate his daily journey as a doctor serving at the frontlines of mortality. Moving from crisis to crisis, Maskalyk wields visceral and edgy prose as he recounts his toils in the space bridging pain and peace. He reveals compelling universal truths about the power, and limits, of medicine – “life caring for itself,” as he defines it – the strength of human will, and the fragile, infinitesimal gap between dying and living.” – 2017 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (Susan Harada, Arno Kopecky, and Siobhan Roberts)

not available