Island of the Mad
Author: Sheck, Laurie
ISBN: 9781640090088
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 12 Sep 2017
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback / softback
Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed i>A Monster's Notes/i>, and with Sheck's characteristic brilliance of language, i>Island of the Mad/i> follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A., as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about.br>br>br>br>Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes' boat-ride from Venice. At the island's old, abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island's former inhabitants-a woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman's eyesight fails, she wants only one thing-that her friend read to her from Dostoevsky's great novel, i>The Idiot/i>, a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.
ISBN: 9781640090088
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 12 Sep 2017
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback / softback
Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed i>A Monster's Notes/i>, and with Sheck's characteristic brilliance of language, i>Island of the Mad/i> follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A., as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about.br>br>br>br>Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes' boat-ride from Venice. At the island's old, abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island's former inhabitants-a woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman's eyesight fails, she wants only one thing-that her friend read to her from Dostoevsky's great novel, i>The Idiot/i>, a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.
