Patient X Paperback by David Peace

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage (2019-08-20)
• Language: English
• Pages: 336
• ISBN-13: 9780525564119
• Weight: 351.54 grams
• Dimensions: 20.17 x 13.36 x 2.29 cm

In these twelve interconnected tales, David Peace—acclaimed author of the Red Riding Quartet, Occupied City, and Tokyo Year Zero—weaves fact and fiction as he takes up the brief but fiercely lived life of the early-twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Unique and offbeat, Patient X delves into Akutagawa’s rich and complicated private life: his fears and battles with mental illness; his complex reaction to the Westernization of Japan; his exacting creative process; and his suicide, weaving these facets into a hauntingly evocative portrait. But Patient X is more than a paean to one remarkable writer: it is also an incandescent exploration of the act and obsession of writing itself, and of the role of the artist in times that darkly mirror our own.

About the Author

David Peace—named in 2003 one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists—was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three); GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. The final part of his Tokyo Trilogy—to follow Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City—will appear after Patient X, his tenth novel. He lives in Tokyo.