Will Self UMBRELLA Signed Hardback
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Will Self UMBRELLA Signed Hardback
First edition, fourth print hardback of UMBRELLA by Will Self and published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London, in 2012. Signed by Will Self on the title page. A Hatchard's 'Signed Copy' paper band is also included, although this has some damage to it and is not in the picture below.The book is in near fine condition (clean illustrated light brown boards and brown/beige lettering on the front and spine) with minor shelf wear. No dust jacket as issued. Internally, the pages are clean and tight, there are no tears and no other inscriptions.
Will Self is the author of ten novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and five collections of non-fiction writing. His work has been translated into 22 languages, and his novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical, and is predominantly set within London. His subject matter often includes mental illness, illegal drugs and psychiatry.
He is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002 and The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, winner of the 1993 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Grey Area, Cock & Bull, My Idea of Fun, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, Great Apes, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Dorian, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, and The Book of Dave.
Self is a regular contributor to publications including Playboy, The Guardian, Harpers, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. He currently writes a column for New Statesman, and over the years he has been a columnist for The Observer, The Times and the Evening Standard. His columns for Building Design on the built environment, and for the Independent Magazine on the psychology of place brought him to prominence as a thinker concerned with the politics of urbanism.
Will Self is a regular contributor on British television, initially as a guest on comic panel shows such as Have I Got News for You and Shooting Stars, but latterly appearing on current affairs programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time. He is also a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4.
Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2012, Will Self's first nomination.
"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. - James Joyce, Ulysses
Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.
A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences.
Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive?
Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date."
'Self has never been shortlisted for the Booker, but Umbrella is such a linguistically adept, emotionally subtle and ethically complex novel that this could and should be his year' Guardian
'A tour de force ... Despite the bleakness of the message, by the end you are filled with elation at the author's exuberant ambition and the swaggering way he carries it all off, and then a huge sense of deflation at the realisation that whatever book you read next, it won't be anything like this' Daily Mail
'A dazzling feat of imagination and structure: a sprawling, lyrical, stream-of-consciousness narrative that squares up to modernism and brings it kicking and screaming into the 21st century ... stomach- lurchingly ambitious' Observer
'The reader is snagged on moments of brilliance and, most thrilling of all, left to make her own connections' Daily Telegraph
'Ambitious and mind-blowing linguistic tapestry of a novel' Independent on Sunday
'Amazing - it's like a different creature altogether' Alison Moore, The Observer
397 pages.
ISBN: 9781408820148
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Will Self UMBRELLA Signed Hardback
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