Botany of Madness

A young man is gripped by one fear: that he'll lose his mind.

With depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia spread across his family tree, the odds are not in his favour. So, he does what any analytically minded man might do: he tries to calculate the statistical probability of his own madness. What follows is a restless, darkly comic journey—from New York to Paris to Vienna—as he tries to outrun a fate that seems written into his DNA, only to end up working as a psychologist inside the very institution he's spent his life fearing.

There, surrounded by stories that echo his own family's, he begins to see with a new, hard-earned clarity. In this bestselling German debut, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, Engler unravels a compassionate tale of reconciliation in which the protagonist is forced to confront a question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

'Irresistible. A book that is at once grave and light, tender and tough, satirical and earnest.'
—Siri Hustvedt

'A daring debut novel from a promising new literary voice, Germany's Leon Engler ... Quirky and bittersweet, Botany of Madness is just right for Christian Kracht and Katharina Volckmer fans ... phenomenal, darkly comic.'
—Shelf Awareness, starred review

'Illuminating ... moves at a roving pace ... Botany of Madness is a riveting novel in which a man weighs mental illness with prismatic precision, his work involving scientific classifications, autofiction, and memory.'
—Foreword Reviews