Filer presents someone helpless in the face of his grief, a burden he can't share with his own sweet, damaged parents. "Mental illness turns people inwards," Matthew remarks.

Falls are a common, but often overlooked, cause of injury. Around 1 in 3 adults over 65 and half of people over 80 will have at least one fall a year. In 2014 the novel was awarded Specsavers Popular Fiction Book of the Year by Specsavers National Book Award [12] as well as the Writers' Guild of Great Britain award for Best First Novel. [13] The book, which took Filer three years to write, is based on his MA at Bath Spa University where he now lectures in creative writing. But the story has been on his mind for far longer. "I first started thinking of the main character when I was training as a nurse in 2003 so I've been mulling over it for years," he said.Writers' Guild Awards 2014/15". Writers' Guild of Great Britain. 19 January 2015 . Retrieved 15 April 2019. What is spectacular about this book is how immersed in our main character you get, he is telling the story of his life, his feelings, thoughts, his mental illness, it's a bit like sitting in the room with someone, listening avidly to their life story. And feeling things along the way. Matthew was never quite the same after that, either. He’ll tell you that “you notice it when he isn’t there anymore. You notice so many of the places where he isn’t, and you hear so many of the things he doesn’t say. I do. I hear them all the time.” I had filled hundreds of bottles and jars with earth, connecting groups of them together with plastic tubing. The hydrogens were already up and running – they’re the easiest to build – a single proton and a single electron … The oxygens took more work, two electrons in the first shell, and six in the outer shell. Then I would pair them up, colliding a pair of electrons from each to make the covalent bonds. This often smashed the glass, so most of the ants had escaped. The carpet was crawling with them.

Hughes-Hallett's book The Pike has already won her the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Her subject, D'Annunzio, was an early 20th-century poet and demagogue who in 1919 tried to set up what he saw as a utopian modern state called Fiume in what is now Croatia. Judges called the book "an unexpectedly seductive biography which brilliantly transports the reader into the mind of a monstrous talent who was at the heart of Europe's dark past". A compelling story of grief, madness and loss. Filer has an ear for the dark comedy of life, and Matthew is a charismatic lead character who draws you in even as his world falls apart’ a long-term health condition, such as heart disease, dementia or low blood pressure (hypotension), which can lead to dizziness and a brief loss of consciousness This novel follows the story of a young man named Matthew. We are told of the tragic death of Matthew's brother during childhood and how he blames himself for its occurrence. As the reader we are unsure as to whether Matthew is actually guilty of the death of his brother or whether it was just a tragic accident. Nearer the end of the novel we discover the real story as to how his brother died.In the present, Matt is being treated at the Hope Road Day Centre mental hospital. He was committed there by his parents, Richard and Susan, after his grandmother found him attempting to make a giant ant farm in his flat, which a hallucination of Simon told him to do. Matt finds his experience at the ward repetitive, and often complains about the rigid schedule. One of Matt's therapists asks him to perform a genogram – which eventually makes him remember what happened to Simon by writing about the night he died. It is revealed that Simon's death was the result of a harmless prank gone wrong, where Simon accidentally fell off of a short cliff. It was named as one of five category winners for the Costas and will go forward to compete for the overall book of the year prize, to be decided later this month. Nathan Filer (25 January 2014). "Mental Health Care: where did it all go so wrong?". The Guardian . Retrieved 11 February 2015. It contains an easy-to-inject needle with a dose of hormone called epinephrine. You can use it to treat anaphylaxis. Osim toga, roman je prožet i odličnim humorom (poprilično crnim), čak i pored toga što se bavi ozbiljnim problemima - opakom bolešću uma, detetom sa daunovim sindromom,...

The book cleverly gives you snippets of a story, then later on you get more of that story to give you the fuller picture, so there is a lot of a-ha moments, at least there was for me. I found it sad in parts, I really felt for his struggle against the illness that has hold of him, his moving between lucidity and delusion. Epically done. The other vital element to this novel is that not only does Matthew blame himself, but he is also slowly descending into schizophrenia. We watch as his mental health suffers under the pressure of the self-inflicted guilt surrounding his brothers death. Seeing Matthew grow throughout the novel was touching. Filer, also a regular fixture on the stand up poetry circuit, said being a mental health nurse was fulfilling as well as frustrating. "It is not a terribly good time to get unwell at the moment or need NHS services for mental illness. There are a lot of cuts and beds closing. It is a difficult time to be a nurse, it's a very difficult time to be a patient," he said. The use of various fonts interspersed with simple drawings complement well the inconsistent thought process which Matt's thought process follows. Moreover, the subtle references to past events, without explaining full details, created momentum in a plot which could simply have been a procession of unrelated ideas. This book encompassed so many themes on death, grieving and mental health issues that it also feels like it lasted so much longer than it really did - though without dragging in the slightest.It's a story about a family coming to terms with grief and it is a character study of Matthew Holmes and one of the things about him is that he's got schizophrenia. But it's not a novel about schizophrenia and it's not a novel about the NHS," said the author. Matt's mental illness was not taken lightly in this book, and this is what made it feel so realistic in my opinion. It wasn't introduced as something that can be fixed overnight. It's a daily struggle for the patient and his family. It's essentially the story of a young man's descent into mental illness, from childhood events to trying to live as an independent adult and on to life in a mental health care facility. Matt Homes is a young man from Bristol with schizophrenia, writing out his life story which centres around the death of his Downs Syndrome brother when they were children. As Matt’s narrative progresses, we learn there’s more to his brother’s death than he initially lets on and that this is why he carries around feelings of guilt.