What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 258 pages
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 189 pages
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R
The Gravity of Love
Sara Stridsberg · 287 pages
Jim - charming, captivating, much loved by his women friends - has attempted suicide several times. Over his period of incarceration at the Beckomberga hospital for the mentally unstable, he voices his determination to succeed. Someday soon, he tells his daughter - as he has earlier told his mother and his wife - he will swallow 60 tablets, help them down with a bottle of whisky, and swim impossib
Blindness
Jose Saramago · 327 pages
A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone tryi
Freud's Sister
Gotse Smilevski, Goce Smilevski · 266 pages
Imagines the life of Sigmund Freud's favorite sister, Aldolfina, who was taken to a concentration camp after her brother was granted an exit visa to London but didn't take any family with him.
Signs for Lost Children
Sarah Moss · 368 pages
Only weeks into their marriage a young couple embark[s] on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses and his wife Ally, a doctor, takes work at the Truro asylum where she must struggle against the terrible conditions imposed on the patients, the mores of late Victorian society and her own demons.
Endless Love
Scott Spencer · 417 pages
"One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful book ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield. David and Jade are consumed with each other: their rapport, their desire, their sexuality, take them further than they
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey · 311 pages
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into
Cut
Patricia McCormick · 160 pages
While confined to a mental hospital, thirteen-year-old Callie slowly comes to understand some of the reasons behind her self-mutilation, and gradually starts to get better.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Hannah Green, Joanne Greenberg · 252 pages
The Quickening Maze
Adam Foulds · 258 pages
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same tim
Malina
Ingeborg Bachmann · 263 pages
Malina is a 1971 novel by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. It tells the story of a female writer and her relationships with two different men, one joyous and one introverted. The text deals with themes including gender relations, guilt, mental illness, writing, and collective and personal trauma in the context of post-Second World War Vienna. The book was adapted into a 1991 film with the sa
The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry · 300 pages
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges
K-Pax
Gene Brewer · 248 pages
When a new patient is brought to a mental ward claiming to be an inhabitant of a planet called K-PAX, the hospital seems to be just the place for him. But virtually everyone who meets this gentle and empathetic character is changed for the better.
The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways w
The Drinker
Hans Fallada · 304 pages
An autobiographical novel written during the Second World War in Germany in 1944 during the author's confinement in a medical asylum. It is a self-portrait of an alcoholic and the effect of his behaviour on his surroundings, especially on his deteriorating marriage.
Moravagine
Blaise Cendrars, Alan Brown · 236 pages
"At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatris
The Whalestoe Letters
Mark Z. Danielewski · 83 pages
"Between 1982 and 1989, Pelafina H. Lièvre sent her son, Johnny Truant, a series of letters from The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a psychiatric facility in Ohio where she spent the final years of her life. Beautiful, heartfelt, and tragic, this correspondence reveals the powerful and deeply moving relationship between a brilliant though mentally ill mother and the precocious, gifted young son
Insanity
Cameron Jace · 254 pages
After accidentally killing everyone in her class, Alice Wonder is now a patient in the Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum. No one doubts her insanity. Only a hookah-smoking professor believes otherwise; that he can prove her sanity by decoding Lewis Carroll's paintings, photographs, and find Wonderland's real whereabouts. Professor Caterpillar persuades the asylum that Alice can save lives and catch the won
Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje · 156 pages
Buddy Bolden, a New Orleans barber, cornet player, and full-time editor of a gossip sheet, disappears for two years, and when he returns, he goes berserk and spends his final years in the East Louisiana state hospital.
Grace Williams Says It Loud
Emma Henderson · 327 pages
On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, who can type with his feet, fills Grace's head with tales from Paris and the world beyond. This is Grace's story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny s
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 70 pages