A novel about friendship, madness and modernism
London in 1935 is a world of dingy pubs and bedsits; of strange inventions like psychoanalysis, feminism and modernist art; of fascism, communism and looming war; of asylums in which the mentally ill are subjected to cruel and primitive treatments. Arthur, a junior doctor in London’s oldest mental hospital, is about to compromise his medical ethics for the sake of his closest friend, a brilliant and charismatic aspiring writer called Louis.
But soon Arthur finds that he doesn’t want to become a minor character in someone else’s story, he must change the narrative of his lifelong friendship, and create a story of his own.
