As the global COVID-19 pandemic reaches the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand, four women find themselves in novel circumstances as healthcare professionals, and in their personal lives. In these new fictional tales from the author of Admissions, we meet doctors, nurses and other workers as a public hospital struggles to prepare for the worst.




In the days before lockdown, a nurse's visit to the supermarket has an unexpected outcome...

A medical student employed in the hospital kitchens begins a relationship with another essential worker who provides her with an alternative education...

When her daughter returns home with the virus, a professor of obstetrics faces the challenges of her hospital work while meeting the demands of motherhood under lockdown...

Home alone after her husband is taken away, a retired surgeon reflects on life, love and death in the time of COVID...




In New Admissions, each woman's voice draws back the curtain on the lives of healthcare workers as they face the pandemic. These four highly engaging stories explore themes of caring and coping, joy and passion, fear and death - and most importantly of love, in all its complicated forms - in the time of lockdown.