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Heavy Light

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Heavy Light is the story of a breakdown: a journey through mania, psychosis and treatment in a psychiatric hospital, and onwards to release, recovery and healing.

After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act.

From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we can be healed - or not - by treatment. A story of the wonder and intensity of the manic experience, as well as its peril and strangeness, it is shot through with the love, kindness, humour and care of those who deal with someone who becomes dangerously ill.

Partly a tribute to those who looked after Horatio, from family and friends to strangers and professionals, and partly an investigation into how we understand and treat acute crises of mental health, Heavy Light's beauty, power and compassion illuminate a fundamental part of human experience. It asks urgent questions about mental health that affect each and every one of us.

A 'Book to look out for in 2021' in the Observer

'An extraordinary book: deeply moving, darkly funny and hugely powerful' Robert Macfarlane

'One of the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us us now to that most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with such wit, warmth, and humanity, that, better acquainted with its terrors, we may better face our own' Reverend Richard Coles

'A record of the bravest, most perilous, most intrepid journey that any human being can ever make. It is stricken, moving, urgent, crucial . . . A luminous, beautiful achievement' Niall Griffiths

© Horatio Clare 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

A beautiful, unflinchingly honest book about madness, mania, parenting, surviving and, above all, love and its power to heal us
Rachel Clarke, author of Dear Life and Breathtaking
A brave, lit-up account of going mad and getting better, that forensically tracks the footprints of both journeys towards a settlement with the self
Jeanette Winterson
Readers of Clare's game-changing memoir . . . will be struck by the fact that a mind so recently dominated by straight-to-DVD fantasies is now capable of reflecting on them with so much gentle wisdom and acute self-awareness. And in such beautiful, witty prose
Daily Telegraph
Hard-hitting but tender-hearted . . . Clare thoughtfully and determinedly seeks to challenge the status-quo on treatment for mental health conditions
Independent
What a gift...having such an articulate agent, reporting back from the far edges of the mind
Sunday Times
I loved Heavy Light: its honesty, its questing intelligence...his description of our threadbare mental health services, and the inhuman pressures on those who work in them, is heart-breaking. We have to do better
British Medical Journal
A shattering journey . . . remarkable
Times Literary Supplement
Clare is a wildly endearing narrator of his own turmoil . . . [his] is a persuasive argument not only against chemical answers to his own illness, but also against the hasty (and often permanent) way individuals are labelled with diagnostic categories
Financial Times
Compelling, beautifully-written and utterly devastating. A balm in itself
Evening Standard
Clare brilliantly describes his mania... But he has a wider purpose here. Following his discharge from hospital Clare sets out to explore alternatives to the lifetime of terrifyingly strong medication he has been prescribed
Lady
Author Horatio Clare
Narrator Horatio Clare
Duration 9 hours and 21 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781473594784
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Care of people with mental health issues, Coping with mental health issues, Family and health, Medicine: general issues, Memoirs, Mental health services, Popular medicine and health, Psychiatric and mental disorders, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, Society and Social Sciences
Availability AU, GB, IE

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