Like many a London millennial, Will Hunter’s Twitter feed is a satisfying mix of pop culture and spiky political commentary. But as a junior doctor, Hunter has the added insight of life on an A&E ward. There’s a patient he finds ‘absolutely covered head to toe in [their] own faeces’. Another tweet reads, ‘I’ve been to see a patient who had his arm amputated and when I was doing something fiddly… out of habit I said, “This is the bit where I always need an extra hand”, and he just looked at me for ages and then went, “Yeah mate, I know the feeling.”’
‘Working in A&E, it’s sad and intense, but there’s also so much humour and absurdity,’ says Hunter. The 29-year-old doctor — and soon to be published author under Stormzy’s #Merky Books imprint — is speaking to me over Zoom from his hotel in San Cristobal, southern Mexico where he’s finishing up four months of travelling; and the final chapters of his debut novel, People Like Us. Slated as ‘a story of a boy who falls in love with a family and into a world in which he doesn’t belong’, Hunter’s novel beat a thousand entries with a narrative that explores a young mixed race man enamoured by west London upper middle class society, while wrestling with his own identity.
