Coming soon - May 2024
The Bullet
Tom Lee
Like many people, Tom Lee remembers the presence – somewhere out of sight, on the outskirts of town – of the local psychiatric hospital. It was a place that inspired jokes, rumours and dread, a place where the strange and deranged were kept away. But among those people were, at different times, Tom’s own parents.
Afterwards, those times were not much spoken about and before long the hospital closed, as part of the nationwide shutting down of psychiatric institutions. For many years, Tom believed that he had dodged the bullet of the mental illness that had marked the lives of his parents. But then, quite out of the blue, he has a crisis of his own and finds himself returning to the past for clues. The Bullet is an attempt to piece together and understand what happened to his parents and what happened to him. It is also a story about how we have tried and spectacularly failed to care for people suffering with mental illness, and about the terrifying fragility and unknowability of the human mind.
Publications
The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
Tom Lee
Translated by
James Orr – husband, father, reliable employee and all round model citizen – wakes one morning to find himself quite transformed.
There’s no way he can go into the office, and the doctors aren’t able to help. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he wanders the idyllic estate where he lives, with its pretty woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was.
A story that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr introduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.
£8.99
Tom Lee on Granta.com
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Issue 140
The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
Tom Lee
‘As it was, this gave the impression of two different faces, two different people, welded savagely together.’
