4 May 1970. It's a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain,
and at the Concept House therapeutic community he has set up in the London
suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner has been tricked
into joining a decidedly ill-advised LSD trip with several of its disturbed
residents. Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven
Spielberg's Jaws with his young son, Busner realizes the true nature of the
events that transported on that dread-soaked day, when a survivor of the
worst disaster in the US Navy's history - the sinking of the USS
Indianapolis in the shark-infested south Pacific - came face to face with
the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gray's mission to
Hiroshima. Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella,
Will Self's new novel weaves together multiple narratives across several
decades of the twentieth century to produce a fiendish tapesty depicting
the state we're enmeshed in. Praise for Umbrella Shortlisted for the 2012
Man Booker Prize 'Miraculously captivating.' Mark Lawson, Guardian 'A
wonderful piece of sustained writing and passion.' A. L. Kennedy, Scotsman
'Will Self finds his authentic voice as a writer and reclaims the high
Modernist mode as a natural and highly emotional form of narration. It's
exhilarating'. Jonathan Coe, Metro 'A work of unparalleled audacity . . .
fascinating and compulsive.' John Boyne, Irish Times 'Daring, exuberant and
richly dense . . . Will Self has carried the Modernist challenge into the
twenty-first century, and worked a wonder.' John Banville