A thought-provoking journey through some of the strangest ways our brains can delude us and what these can teach us about medicine, narrative and being human
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 PEN AMERICA LITERARY AWARDS*
'Superb, compelling, delightfully labyrinthine' Telegraph
'The book fans of Oliver Sacks have been craving' The i
'Lyrical and spellbinding' New Scientist
'The best book I have read in years' Psychologist
A young woman channelling the voice of the Holy Spirit. A mother whose children have been replaced by changelings. A family cursed by a mysterious inability to sleep. Pria Anand's patients come to her with myriad peculiar symptoms, but they all have something in common: their diagnosis always hinges on a story. Her task as a neurologist is akin to a detective's, piecing together the clues in a patient's account with the tells of their body in order to settle on a diagnosis.
In her gorgeously lyrical, passionate and humane first book, Pria Anand shares stories of her own patients alongside her own experiences as a doctor, a mother and a patient, in order to explore all the bizarre ways in which our brains go awry. Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that the strangest symptoms experienced by any single individual can show us something universal about being human.
