Full of his trademark jagged-edged satire and dark wit, The Quantity Theory of Insanity is Will Self's highly acclaimed fictional debut. Among the curious and disturbing subjects it deals with are the Ur-Bororo, a superhumanly dull tribe of Amazonian bores; the terrible, seductive secret of Ward 9; the revolutionary possibilities of waiting; and, of course, the Quantity Theory itself, the thesis that to suppress insanity in one part of the population merely causes it to pop up elsewhere . . .
