The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars
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  • Published: 3 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141973203
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey

Formats & editions
EBook
3 May 2018
Audiobook
3 May 2018
Paperback
2 May 2019
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An audacious and beautiful account of grief and who we are. Memoir, neuroscience and myth interweave to create a book unlike any other

A man's wife dies. What next? The next day is next, and the next, and so on. He smothers his sorrow and gets on with the days. He's a Stoic. Tranquillity is the goal, but his brain won't rest. As a neuropsychologist he has spent a career trying to fathom the human brain but now, he comes to realize, his brain is struggling to make sense of him - probing, doubting, reconstructing.

Combining neurological case stories and memoir, and with excursions into speculative fiction and mythology, this is an audaciously original, deeply personal meditation on grief, time and selfhood.
  • Published: 3 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141973203
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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Praise for The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars is a work of extraordinary insight and imagination. Broks is a 21st century Dante of the human psyche, guiding us on a journey full of surprise, erudition, and wit

David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees

In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There's science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are - and who we hope to be

Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

Broks weaves many threads - memoir, neuroscience, and metaphysics - into a rich fabric of reflection, speculation and deep feeling. This is a work that defies categorization, fusing non-fiction and imagination into a single instrument of piercing insight and emotional honesty

Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

A rewarding mind to spend some time with

David Aaronovitch, The Times

A wonderful, strange and genre-defying book

Adam Zerman, Standpoint

[A] beautifully written investigation of grief ... As an exploration of love and loss, as a portrait of a person and of the nature of personhood, this book is about as true as any I have read

James McConnachie, Sunday Times

Truly remarkable prose . . . Throughout, Broks is like a naturalist taking you through the wilderness of the human mind, and he's a companionable guide.

Eben Schwartz, The Journal of the American Medical Association

A beautifully written addition to brain literature ... will mesmerise anyone curious about the mass of goo inside our heads

John O’Connell on 'Into the Silent Land', Time Out Book of the Week

Full of wonders and unsettling new perspectives

Review of 'Into the Silent Land', Independent on Sunday

Reads as light as a souffle, yet has the resonant depth to haunt you for the rest of your days

John McCrone review of 'Into the Silent Land', Guardian

Rich with disturbing images, eerie characters, wistful philosophical reflection ... in terms of sheer prose ability he is a modern master

Andrew Marr, Telegraph