This powerful and thought-provoking debut novel records the agonising breakdown, triggered by his mother’s death, of a mind suddenly confronted by a tragedy that is, for the most part, of its own making. Exploring the breakdown via two voices - one, emotionally very close to the person suffering the breakdown but cut off from him, and the other, the sufferer himself - and interlacing poetry and objective views from current scientific thinking give the book a unique perspective.
The death of George's mother triggers in him guilt-riddled memories of the breakup of his marriage and his subsequent neglect of both wife and mother. He relates in polyphony of voices the build-up to a series of breakdowns and his eventual confinement in a clinic. These voices are interleaved with the voice of his estranged wife, Amanda. The voices echo off each other, revealing their lives to be so intertwined that they must reunite after George has recovered. The reunion is however short-lived. George is again stranded with guilt-riddled memories that refuse to fade. George attempts to understand his extreme states of mind not on Freud's by now creaky couch, but rather in terms of current ideas in neurobiology and quantum physics. During the meanderings of his mind, he touches also upon the ultimate questions of existence. He attempts at the same time to find through poetry, a form that will accommodate the mess that's in his head.
