Island of the Mad

Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed A Monster''s Notes and with Sheck''s characteristic brilliance of language Island of the Mad follows the solitary hunchbacked Ambrose A. as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about.. . Eventually he arrives in San Servolo the Island of the Mad in the Venetian Lagoon only a few minutes'' boatride from Venice. At the island''s old abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island''s former inhabitantsa woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until increasingly hallucinatory and feverish they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman''s eyesight fails she wants only one thingthat her friend read to her from Dostoevsky''s great novel The Idiot a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.