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SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012

At Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica epidemic at the end of the First World War and has slept through most of the twentieth century. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences. Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most imaginative and challenging novel to date. Extraordinary Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including How the Dead Live , which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002 and The Butt, w inner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008. He lives in South London.