Botany of Madness
Translated by Alexandra Roesch
Overview
A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind.
With depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia spread across his family tree, the odds are not in his favour. So, he does what any analytically minded man might do: he tries to calculate the statistical probability of his own madness. What follows is a restless, darkly comic journey — from New York to Paris to Vienna — as he tries to outrun a fate that seems written into his DNA, only to end up working as a psychologist inside the very institution he’s spent his life fearing.
There, surrounded by stories that echo his own family’s, he begins to see with a new, hard-earned clarity. In this bestselling German debut, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, Engler unravels a compassionate tale of reconciliation in which the protagonist is forced to confront a question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 208 pages
- 9781917189767
- GBP£10.99
- 11 March 2027
- UK & Commonwealth (ex. Can)
- DuMont Buchverlag
Categories
Praise
‘Irresistible. A book that is at once grave and light, tender and tough, satirical and earnest.’
‘A fantastic book — abysmal and yet comforting. I devoured it.’
About the Author
Leon Engler grew up in Munich and studied theatre, film, media, cultural studies, and psychology in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He has published numerous theatre plays, radio plays, and short stories and was awarded the 3sat Prize at the Bachmann Competition in 2022. He works as an author, psychologist, and lecturer in psychology and literary writing. Botany of Madness is his debut novel.
Translator
Alexandra Roesch is a bicultural, bilingual freelance translator based in Frankfurt, Germany. An experienced translator of fiction and nonfiction, she has an MA in translation from the University of Bristol and was longlisted for the 2018 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.