Reveals how Alice Sebold's life was transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was raped and beaten in a park near campus. This book also chronicles her recovery as she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction.

Janet Drummond does a tally of her three children: Wade spent the night in jail again; suicidal Bryan; and Sarah - the star of the next shuttle mission. But even an astronaut has personal problems, and with Janet's ex-husband coming to town, Janet contemplates where it all went wrong. Or did it?

Karen, an attractive, popular student, goes into a coma one night in 1979. Whilst in it she gives birth to a healthy baby daughter and when she recovers eighteen years later she finds herself a middle-aged mother whose friends have all gone through all the normal marital, social and political traumas and back again.

Esther Greenwood is at college and is fighting two battles, one against her own desire for perfection in all things - grades, boyfriend, looks, career - and the other against remorseless mental illness. As her depression deepens she finds herself encased in it, bell-jarred away from the rest of the world. This is the story of her journey back into reality. Highly readable, witty and disturbing, ..

This is the story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of grandeur) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa Claus and a certifiable lunatic. Suddenly at the age of 12, Augusten found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian house in perfect squalor.

This work is a personal testimony from Kay Redfield Jamison: the revelation of her struggle with manic depression since adolescence, and how it has shaped her life. The book follows her through college, a love affair, her battle with the illness, bouts of madness, violence and attempted suicide.