Fleshmarket

About this book

When Essie and Robbie’s mother dies, following a failed operation, they are abandoned by their father and left to fend for themselves in nineteenth-century Edinburgh.

Robbie becomes mixed up in the sinister dealings of Burke and Hare, who provide doctors with bodies for research, but in doing so risks losing everything he holds dear.

Morgan’s historical novel, based on real people, leaves us in no doubt about the debt we owe both to pioneering surgeons and the patients who allowed themselves to be operated on without anaesthetic.