The Nobel Peace prize-winning author's controversial masterpiece

'I am going mad, Pedro. I feel it. I know it. I have plunged into madness as into the sea. And I am about to sink into its depths . . .'

Raphael Lipkin hears voices and talks to ghosts. Spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a New York psychiatric hospital, he is not a patient but rather a visiting professional with a secret, highly personal quest.

A Holocaust survivor who has painstakingly rebuilt his life, he has watched, horrified and helpless, as it all started coming apart. He longs for Pedro, the man who rescued him in postwar Poland - who became his mentor, hero, saviour and friend - and taught him truth from falsehood. But Pedro vanished into Stalin's gulags . . .

Desperate to explain his own survival, Raphael now seeks among the delusional patients the answers to the mysteries of good, evil and madness.