Mind on Fire is a truly powerful, arresting, haunting account. Arnold Thomas Fanning has reckoned with the darkest matter of his heart and mind, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by that.

[A] painfully intense, courageous and gripping account of [Fanning's] journey to the underworld of madness and back. This is a brave and instructive book.

In this strange and singular book, Arnold Thomas Fanning mercilessly excavates the infernal underworld of his own years of madness. As reminiscent as it occasionally is of John Healy's The Grass Arena, and even of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, the book is ultimately not quite like anything else I've read, and brought me as close to the lived reality of mental illness as I have ever been. It's a significant achievement: a painful, inexorable work of autobiography, whose existence is its own form of redemption.

This is an extraordinary memoir about how it feels to be depressed, delusional, desperate

Extraordinary. An account of mental illness, grief, delusions, homelessness, a fractured family relationship ... and all while trying to recover and create. Superb writing on a frequently difficult subject.

Arnold Thomas Fanning offers the most vivid and unflinching window into the mind of someone who is in the throes of madness ... It was like nothing I'd read before

Incredibly important

A spellbinding memoir that should prove both moving and hopefully cathartic for the reader

Wonderful

Told in tight and immediate first-person, and imbued with a startling momentum that ratchets unnervingly, Fanning's publishing debut ... is a significant achievement and should be a talking point in publishing this year

Fanning's debut book lays it on the line in a deeply personal and compelling chronicle of his descent into depression and his way back out.

Unsparingly direct, searing and honest ... It is gripping to read and must have been exhausting to live

One of the most gripping and revealing memoirs I've read in a long time. A controlled and artful exploration of absolute loss of control, an unsettling and at times very moving reconstruction of a period of serious mental illness, Mind on Fire is a beautiful book about a terrifying thing.

Gripping

Shocking

A ratcheting pace, a tight first-person immediacy, and utterly staggering to be a passenger over its entire warped course ... An indelible, ground-shaking account

Poignant, beautifully detailed memoir

Brave and illuminating

Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Nell Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships. Each one in the novel-whether between adults, adults and children, or among children-is unique, finely calibrated, and real. The title is a line from a poem by W.H. Auden, which doesn't fully hit until the end of the book, when it takes on heart-rending poignancy

I love novels that are obsessed with the "erotics of knowledge," books that understand how ideas are not the opposite of feelings but rather their intense distillation. A. S. Byatt's "Possession," Ann Patchett's "State of Wonder," Barbara Kingsolver's recent "Unsheltered," and Nell Freudenberger's forthcoming "Lost and Wanted" all are marvelous depictions of the direct link between the body's cravings and the passions of the mind

Freudenberger's outstanding achievement is that Lost and Wanted is also a moving story about down-to-earth issues like grief and loneliness

A true triumph

An unambiguous success

A marvellous book

A deliciously precise and perceptive writer

An incandescent talent

Genuinely moving . . . Freudenberger demonstrates her assurance as a novelist and her knowledge of the complicated arithmetic of familial love, and the mathematics of romantic passion

Every minute I was away from this book I was longing to be back in the world she created

An ode to the companionship of the women on the neonatal ward in the darkest, most volatile days, it is moving but never mawkish

A song of praise to the beleaguered, indomitable NHS, with writing at such a pitch that it lingered with me all year

A heart-tugging account… this is one of the year’s most exquisitely written books