Losing Your Mind - The Novel That Induces Insanity

Nobody wants to go mad. We try to live healthy lives so that we won’t die slowly of lung cancer or quickly from a heart attack. But what we let ourselves worry about less – because there is so little we can do to protect against it – is living long enough to have our minds cruelly betray us, leaving us trapped in bodies that still work but in a world that no longer makes sense.

In Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom dementia has become an infectious disease amongst the elderly, with every patient who checks into a certain Manhattan clinic developing what “the hospital’s spokesperson, for lack of a diagnosis, is calling ‘copycat Alzheimer’s.’’ It’s a chilling concept, but unfortunately the contagion spreads beyond the page. It’s not just the characters who stumble through the hospital corridors in bewilderment – the novel itself induces the same distressing sense of discombobulation.