'It's all racing round inside my head, faster and faster until the words are a blur. It's like a centrifuge and I can feel my brain caught up in the vortex and I can feel my head about to explode and it all goes faster and faster, my heart and breathing racing too, and I have to sit up and try to slow down, but the darkness is coming in all round, pressing in, crushing my brain that wants to explode, one force against the other but instead of balance, it just makes more pressure so the only escape is light . . .'
A bright young man with a good job, a sweet wife and a beautiful baby suddenly, inexplicably descends into madness. In a daze of Librium, he is taken to a series of institutions where he undergoes all the indignities which are visited on the helpless who have lost their grip.
But Peter is no ordinary man. Childlike and yet sophisticated in his perceptions, Peter's journey through the murky maze of madness is marked by humour, ribaldry and a creative energy which in the end will save him from a heartless system and a cold world.
Not since 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' has there been a novel which touches the emotions with such delicacy.
