Poppy Shakespeare A Novel Clare Allan by Clare Allan 9780747585848, 0747585849 instant download after payment.

Highly original and darkly funny, Clare Allan's debut novel explores the relationship between N., a patient in a mental institution, and Poppy Shakespeare, a new and disturbingly 'sane' arrival who finds herself having to feign mental illness in order to be released. 

A “stunning debut novel... so alive it practically sparks off the page. Oh, and then there’s the riotous humour... In a long literary tradition of novels that chronicle “the Mental Patient,” Poppy Shakespeare stands out because its author has brought the madwoman down from the attic, or out of the shadows, and placed her at the centre of her own tale.”   -  Globe & Mail

There are 25 residents at the Dorothy Fish, one for each letter of the alphabet - the 'X' chair is vacant. The day hospital sits on the bottom floor of an impossibly tall tower, stretching so high into the sky that its uppermost residents can see right around the world and back in through the window behind them. The system is simple: the crazier you are, the higher up the tower they put you. 

When Poppy Shakespeare arrives, N. has already been at Dorothy Fish for thirteen years, and spends her days quietly, smoking in the common room and swapping medication with her fellow patients. But what happens in the next six months will change both of their lives forever. 

"Allan's triumph... is pure voice: N's loopy, dead-on rants — about the vagaries of the system, her unspeakable childhood, and the other patients, whom she calls "dribbles" — blur the line between the mad and the sane, and express how the disenfranchised experience authority."  -  The New Yorker

In this inventive and brutally comic novel, Clare Allan captures the familiar and sometimes terrifying idiosyncrasies of a modern institution, asking the question: who is mad and who is sane? And who gets to decide? By turns, hilarious and heartbreaking, Poppy Shakespeare is a significant achievement of voice and