02154cam a2200325 i 4500 1164547433 TxAuBib 20170113120000.0 160617s2017||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2016020231 9781619028357 hardcover 1619028352 hardcover (OCoLC)951915887 DLC eng rda DLC OCLCO OCLCF OCLCO OCLCQ OCLCO VTL YDX ZHB YDX TxAuBib rda Sheck, Laurie, author. Island of the mad : a novel / Laurie Sheck. Berkeley : Counterpoint, [2017] 437 pages ; 24 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Includes bibliographical references (pages 433-437). "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' boat-ride 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 inhabitants--a 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 thing--that 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."-- Provided by publisher. 20170113. Quests (Expeditions) Fiction. Hospital patients Fiction. Sanatoriums Fiction. San Servolo Island (Italy) Fiction. TXKIP