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, ..

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time.

Now a major film starring Winona Ryder, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave A clear-sighted and unflinching memoir of an eighteen-year-old girl about her two year stay in a psychiatric hospital for depression

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.

Dominick Birdsey's whole existence is coloured by the fact that his twin brother can never be fully responsible for his frightening behaviour, while he himself has beaten the biochemical odds to remain sane. But at what cost?

An account, both harrowing and amusing, of the author's dependence on Prozac, prescribed for her after a series of suicide attempts and breakdowns. She describes her experiences and her determination to get herself off medication.

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.

When college student Laurel Estabrook is attacked while cycling through the forest trails in Vermont, her life is changed forever. So begins Chris Bohjalian's stunning new novel which travels between Jay Gatsby's Long Island and rural New England, between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century.

Dolores Price is the wry and overweight, sensitive and pained, cynical heroine of this novel. The story follows her from four to 40, from her shattered family life through the hellish circles of sexual and food abuse to her gradual recovery and her fight to love again.

The making of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the OED's editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone ...

Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers for a party for her AIDS-suffering poet-friend. This novel meditates on artistic behaviour, love and madness.

A description of the author's devastating descent into depression, this book is an intimate portrait of the agony of Styron's ordeal. It looks at an illness that affects millions but is still widely misunderstood. Styron reveals the anguish of a mind desperate unto death.

The life story of an extraordinary mathematical genius - John Nash - who became schizophrenic, entered remission, and won the Nobel Prize. Nash was only 21 years old and at Princeton University when he invented game theory, the most influential theory of rational human behaviour of our time.

Presents a true story of a woman with sixteen personalities - two of whom were men - and her struggle, against overwhelming odds, for health and happiness.

Helen Knightly has spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare. She steps over a boundary she never dreamt she would even approach. But while her act is almost unconscious, it also seems like the fulfilment of a lifetime's buried desire.

'Walls has carved a story with precision and grace out of one of the most chaotic, heart-breaking childhoods... This deeply affecting memoir is a triumph in every possible way, and it does what all good books should: it affirms our faith in the human spir

This work digs deep and painfully into personal experience of depression and mental illness, while also considering the wider picture: the historical, social, biological, chemical, pharmaceutical and medical aspects and implications of the disease.

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything.

Divers, Dick and Nicole hold court at their villa. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that hold them together.