In this brilliantly conceived novel, Will Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: Is this…it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries that Self’s mother kept for over 40 years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence.

Unflinching, intoxicating, heartfelt and propelled by an exceptional energy, WILL is the long-awaited memoir by Will Self, whose works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into over 20 languages. It spins the reader from Self’s childhood in a quiet North London suburb to his mind-expanding education at Oxford, to a Burroughsian trip to Morocco, an outback vision in Australia, and, finally, a surreal turn in rehab. Echoing the great Modernist writers of the early 20th century in its psychedelic stream of consciousness, WILL is vividly imagistic and mordantly witty. It is both kunstlerroman and confessional, a tale of excess and degradation, a karmic cycle that leads back to the author’s own lack of...will.