- Published: 15 April 2020
- ISBN: 9781784709075
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 224
- RRP: $24.99
Let Me Not Be Mad
A Story of Unravelling Minds
- Published: 15 April 2020
- ISBN: 9781784709075
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 224
- RRP: $24.99
Brilliant and alarming, written with cunning and self-lacerating honesty. The doctor is sick, but his intelligence, his scope of reference, his damaged sagacity could save us all
Iain Sinclair
Let Me Not be Mad is stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I’ve read. I read it in two sittings. Extraordinary
Olivia Laing
A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us
James Rhodes, author of Instrumental
A perfectly extraordinary – not to mention extraordinarily perfect – tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book
Stephen Fry
Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka’s 'The Country Doctor', and you still won’t quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book
William Fiennes
Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths
Stewart Lee
A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I’ve never read anything like it
Professor Mark Lythgoe, UCL
At first I thought this an exceptionally well written book in the genre of medical story telling. The more I read the more I realised it’s an exceptional book in a genre all of its own. Insightful, wonderfully well observed and beautifully written
Suzanne O'Sullivan, author of It's All in Your Head
Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat
Guardian
A mental-health memoir like no other … a genre-defying wake-up call of a book … compelling … clever humane … holding back a sly twist for the end
Observer
A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story
Spectator
Strange, claustrophobic, haunting … a dizzying whirlpool
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson … this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It’s a turbo-charged race
Lisa Appignanesi, New Statesman
Brilliant and engrossing
Roddy Doyle
Along the way the anonymised author, AK Benjamin, offers funny and unsettling insights into the vagaries of the relationship between clinicians and patients
Colin Grant, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*