Richard James The Map of My Vanishing

Some books feel like an open wound. Here, set down in exquisite poetry, is a young man's story that for the reader feels like an act of trespassing. Our protagonist's journey begins brightly - a young boy standing at the edge of the world, eager and expectant, studying its beauty, revelling in the potential within himself. But drenched in feeling, he finds our world a violent home. Slowly, the body weakens, and the mind turns inward. What follows is both brutal and beautiful: a spectacle of suffering, poetry as both wound and salve. A precise and personal autopsy, that in so being, is strikingly universal. In clear reverence for the writers who raised him - Plath, Sexton, Nabokov, Woolf, Pessoa - James transforms his most private journals into a study of the modern mind at its most honest, like a diary that was never meant to be shared.