Summary: Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, "Umbrella" is set around a mental asylum in North London. It is a sprawling, fragmented, stream-of-consciousness story that is centered on a psychiatrist and his patient, Audrey De'Ath. She has been catatonic for decades due to encephalitis lethargica -- the sleeping sickness that Oliver Sacks wrote about in "Awakenings." "Self's novel is an epic, but also a love story, and even a kind of fairytale. ...[I]t unfurls in anarchic flux, like an old-school experimental video. There are no chapters and few paragraph breaks. Scenes dissolve in mid-sentence. Phrases burst suddenly into italics... it holds you fast with a weird charm." -- The New York Times Self is the acclaimed author of six story collections, a book of novellas, six works of journalism and eight novels, including "Great Apes."
