Selected Fiction, Biography and Memoir Books
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut through the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences... (more)
A Duty to Betray
Mental health professionals are required by law to keep patient disclosures confidential, yet the law also requires them to “warn and protect” anyone their patient is likely to harm. A Duty to... (more)
A Jungian Life
From conception until the present, C.G. Jung, his ideas, and analytical psychology itself have been a central thread of Thomas B. Kirsch’s life. His parents, James and Hilde Kirsch, were in analysis... (more)
Understanding Stanley: Looking Through Autism
Understanding Stanley: Looking through Autism is a beautiful, enlightening and groundbreaking book that helps make the invisible, visible. With 64 colour images made over a period of 14 years, this... (more)
The Street
There's more going on in The Street than its inhabitants realise... In the course of this delightful, quirky and perceptive novel an elderly soldier with incipient Alzheimer's saves the life of a... (more)
Hidden Knowledge
Accused of child abuse, Father Roger Tree confesses at once; it masks a darker secret. Meanwhile his sister Romola faces a future without their beloved brother, the novelist Hereward Tree. Can she... (more)
Becoming Freud
Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud - Freud up until the age of fifty - that incorporates all of Freud's many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological... (more)
The Fog of Paranoia: A Sister's Journey Through Her Brother's Schizophrenia
Pat and Sarah had long been friends, not just brother and sister. They supported each other, shared music and movies, and confided in each other as they went through the many challenging stages of... (more)
What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness
Nobody is immune from mental ill health, not even celebrities...We all know someone who suffers from mental illness. It may be a family member, friend, neighbour, or colleague. Now or in the future,... (more)
The Shock of the Fall
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2013
'I'll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name's Simon. I think you're going to like him. I really do.... (more)
Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing
A brave book with a polemical argument on the paradoxes, struggles and advantages of aging. How old am I? Don't ask, don't tell. As the baby boomers approach their sixth or seventh decade, they are... (more)
Waiting for Sunrise
Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the... (more)
Eden Halt: An Antrim Memoir
'We read, as if memory is being assembled in front of us. It is this precision, the beautifully executed detail, that makes Eden Halt a deeply moving memoir.' - Roddy Doyle
Eden Halt describes... (more)
Karl Abraham: The Birth of Object Relations Theory
Together with Ferenczi, Karl Abraham was perhaps Freud’s most creative and devoted disciple. In this book, after outlining the socio-cultural context of the day, Isabel Sanfeliu examines Abraham’s... (more)
Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me
A graphic memoir. Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Suffering from (but enjoying) extreme mania, and terrified that medication would cause her to lose... (more)
Unexpected Lessons in Love
With the wit of Marina Lewycka, the piercing observation of Jane Gardam, and the bittersweet charm of Mary Wesley, this will appeal to all who loved Major Pettigrew's Last Stand or The Guernsey... (more)
The Spinoza Problem: A Novel
In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical novel. A psychiatrist with a deep interest in philosophical issues, Yalom jointly tells the story... (more)
A Personal Journey Through Psychotherapy: A Case Study Revisited
This book is a personal account of the enduring value of an appropriate psychotherapeutic intervention, and is set within the author's lifespan to date. It is also a unique view of how it feels to be... (more)
The Freud Scenario
In 1958, John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a script for a movie about Sigmund Freud. The Freud Scenario, found among Sartre's papers after his death, is the result. A fluent portrait of a... (more)
The Seducer: A Novel
This psychological thriller shows both the hypnotic appeal and the deadly danger of psychopathic seduction. This novel traces the downfall of a married woman, Ana. Feeling trapped in a lacklustre... (more)
Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, her remarkable graphic memoir about her father, established itself immediately as a classic of the genre, being chosen as Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year for 2006,... (more)
Fugues on a Funny Bone
Witty, poignant and penetrating, Jan Woolf's stories - or fugues, as she likes to think of them - take the reader on an episodic journey through the linked lives of children and adults in a London... (more)
Tales from the Therapy Room: Shrink-wrapped
These ten fictional short stories give students of counselling and psychotherapy a unique insight into what actually goes on in therapy. Exploring aspects of the client-therapist relationship, the... (more)
Red Parrot, Wooden Leg
This is an original first novel of an accomplished poet: erotic, humorous, exotic and sensuous. It describes the adventures of two young writers, set in the midst of political repression,... (more)
Couch Tales: Short Stories
A psychoanalyst sits in his consulting room waiting for the next patient. Thoughts, feelings and anxieties about his own current life begin to assault him. Partly as a way of dealing with the crisis... (more)
Poppy Shakespeare
N has been a patient for thirteen years. Like the other patients, her ambition is never to be discharged. Poppy is certain she isn't mentally ill and desperate to return to her life outside and,... (more)
The Interpretation of Murder
"The Interpretation of Murder" is an inventive tour de force inspired by Sigmund Freud`s 1909 visit to America, accompanied by protegeé and rival Carl Jung. When a wealthy young debutante is... (more)
The Truth About Lou (A Necessary Fiction)
This is a compelling novel based on the life of poet Lou Salome - protege of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke and muse to Freud - that brilliantly evokes the Sturm and Drang of turn-of-the-century Europe.... (more)
Crystalline Lifetime: Fragments of Asperger Syndrome
Luke Jackson's lively collection of illustrated poetry allows vivid insights into the internal world of people on the autism spectrum. With a focus on the adolescent years - perhaps the most... (more)