Told through the voices of physicians and patients, this powerful collection of sixteen short stories explores the human drama at the heart of modern clinical genetics. From agonizing prenatal decisions and devastating diagnostic errors to the lifelong impact of birth defects and incurable diseases, each story reveals the profound ethical, emotional, and scientific challenges that arise when medicine intersects with the most intimate moments of life.
Set against the backdrop of hospitals, genetics clinics, and family homes, these stories illuminate the complexities of contemporary healthcare while examining resilience, compassion, and the limits of medical certainty. At times deeply moving and at others unsettling and bordering on body horror, this collection offers an intimate glimpse into the lives forever changed by genetic disease.
Margaret Nowaczyk is a professor of molecular medicine and pediatrics at McMaster University where she has worked for twenty-seven years as a clinical geneticist and a pediatrician. Her stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, Numero Cinq, Broken Pencil, The Examined Life Journal, Room, The Dalhousie Review, LitroNY, Ex-Puritan, and Prairie Fire, who nominated “They Never Listen” for the Journey Prize in 2017. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Grain, Room, and Geist, and has been short-listed for EVENT contest in 2014; it won the 2020 Humber Literary Review/CNFC contest, the 2015 and 2020 Hamilton Short Works Prize, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in 2022. She co-edited an anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories titled Polish(ed) (Guernica Editions 2017) and published two full-length non-fiction books in Poland (in Polish). Her memoir Chasing Zebras was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2021 and won the 2022 Sarton Award for memoir; Marrow Memory, a collection of essays, was published in June 2024, by Wolsak & Wynn, and was named “a book to read this summer” (2024) by the Globe and Mail.
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