Charon Club [TRADE PAPER ]

The AIDS Quilt will be on display in June 2021 for the 40th anniversary of the first cases, but it will be its last appearance as ordered by the heavy hand of the President of the United States. Nine nurses who worked with AIDS patients during the early years of the pandemic travel to Washington, D.C. to see the Quilt. While there, they are called upon by the National Health Center to care for patients with a new, unknown infectious disease and racist views, and they are asked to find the clues to its cause so that a VIP patient can be cured. But the nurses discover that even more challenging than this difficult assignment are the memories they begin to share from their painful AIDS nursing past.The Charon Club, a fictional chronicle of AIDS nurses’ memories and experiences, set in the midst of an emerging infectious disease in the eastern United States in 2021, was written by a nurse who worked on an AIDS unit in New York City during the darkest years of the pandemic. It is the first AIDS novel solely devoted to the work of nurses.The Charon ClubisGina Bright’s first novel. Her short stories have appeared inSundial Magazine,The Copperfield ReviewandZoomorphic. She wrote a non-fiction book,Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), years after working on an AIDS unit in New York City. Gina has a doctorate in medieval English literature and enjoys her work as a registered nurse caring for oncology patients in Norfolk, Va., while writing every day and traveling again with her husband now that the world is opening back up again.C O N T E N T SPart 1 1Viral ReduxPart 2 53Duty CallsPart 3 191Not AgainPart 4 243One More ShiftPart 5 316Keep on RowingAfterword 329About the Author 335About RIZE 337The Charon Club is the first book showing nurses caring for patients during the AIDS pandemic when very few people wanted anything to do with them and it explores the long-tel£”