Sam Thompson

In February of 1935, two young Irishmen walk in the grounds of a London mental hospital. Arthur Bourne, a junior psychiatrist, is about to jeopardise his future for his closest friend, an aspiring writer called Louis Molyneux. Arthur has been overshadowed since childhood by his brilliant, troubled friend. But after years of playing the unassuming companion, he is learning that loyalty has its costs: that old friendship may thwart new love, and perhaps even blur distinctions between the sane and the mad . . . Jott is a story about friendship, madness and modernism from the author of the Man Booker-longlisted Communion Town.

A John Murray Original

Jott

clara

He wanted to suffer like Louis, with the kind of suffering that came from experience - experience painful and thrilling, experience illicit and unspoken, so that the real story of your life was not the one you could tell to friends and colleagues but the one that you wore inside your skin, next to your heart, and showed only by a certain canny composure around the eyes - so that you could regret what had happened instead of what had failed to, and you would not one day have to look back at a long and productive life in which you could not name one true thing you had done. 

Other people tell us about ourselves, and we all want someone who will tell us the story we’d like to believe in.

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