Scribe Publications: New Releases Section

The Eternal Son: a novel

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

In this multi-award-winning autobiographical novel, Cristovão Tezza draws his readers into the mind of a young father whose son, Felipe, is born with Down syndrome. From the initial shock of diagnosis, and through his growing understanding of the world of hospitals and therapies, Tezza threads the story of his son’s life with his own.

Felipe, who lives in an eternal present, becomes a remarkable young man; for Tezza, however, the story is a settling of accounts with himself and his own limitations and, ultimately, a coming to terms with the sublime ironies and arbitrariness of life. He struggles with the phantom of shame, as if his son’s condition were an indication of his own worth, and yearns for a ‘normal’ world that is always out of reach.

Reading this compelling book is like stumbling through a trap door into the writer’s mind, where nothing is censored, and everything is constantly examined and reinterpreted. What emerges is a hard-won philosophy of everyday life.

It is extraordinary to encounter a common human drama — the birth of a disabled child — investigated profoundly by a father who happens to be a gifted writer. The Eternal Son is an honest and insightful story by one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary novelists, here beautifully translated by Alison Entrekin. It is world literature at its finest.

The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting: ageing without growing old

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

'It’s up to us, the baby-boomer generation, to invent a new way of growing old – and paradoxically, this means accepting the ageing process but without becoming "old". How do we become the life and soul of the party and not the party poopers? This impetus behind this book is the certainty that there is something in us that never grows old. I like to call it the heart. Not the organ, which clearly does grow old, but the capacity to love and to desire. This inexplicable, incomprehensible force is what keeps human beings alive.'

The inevitable ageing process does not condemn us to solitude, suffering, degradation or dependency. Without mincing her words, Marie de Hennezel guides us through a true ‘art of growing old’. She recalls her encounters as a clinical psychologist with 'those who grow old gracefully' – and through her experience shows us how to make the most of this time in our lives, to avoid depression and to stay happy.

The Egyptologist

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

From the bestselling author of Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king.

This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston, by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court in turmoil.

Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find in the history of archaeology, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble, having staked his professional reputation and his fiancée’s fortune on a scrap of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile, a relentless Australian detective sets off on the case of his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer. And another murderer. And possibly another murderer. The confluence of these seemingly separate stories results in an explosive ending, at once inevitable and utterly unpredictable.

Arthur Phillips leads this expedition to its unforgettable climax with all the narrative bravado that garnered Prague such critical acclaim. Exploring issues of class, greed, ambition, and the very human hunger for eternal life, this staggering second novel demonstrates Phillips’s range and maturity, for which he has been hailed as one of the most exciting authors of his generation.

The Hidden Brain: how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

Most of us would agree that there’s a clear — and even obvious — connection between the things we believe and the way we behave. But what if our actions are driven not by our conscious values and beliefs but by hidden motivations we’re not even aware of?

‘The hidden brain’ is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside our conscious awareness, but that have a decisive effect on how we behave. The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all of our most complex and important decisions — it decides whom we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, or which way to run when someone yells ‘fire!’ It explains why we can become riveted by the story of a single puppy adrift on an ocean but are quickly bored by a story of genocide. The hidden brain can also be deliberately manipulated to vote against its interest, or even to become a suicide terrorist. But the most disturbing thing is that it does all of this without our knowing.

Shankar Vedantam, author of The Washington Post’s popular ‘Department of Human Behavior’ column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences. His original reporting combines the latest scientific research with compulsively readable narratives that take readers from the American campaign trail to terrorist indoctrination camps, from the World Trade Center on 9/11 to, yes, a puppy adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Vedantam illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an original argument about how we can compensate for our blind spots — and what happens when we don’t.

The Boy in the Moon: a father's search for his disabled son

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

Ian Brown’s son, Walker, was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome: perhaps one hundred people around the world live with it. At twelve, Walker is still in diapers: he is globally delayed, he can’t speak, and he has to wear cuffs on both his arms so that he won’t constantly hit himself. Yet those details don’t capture him. Despite the turmoil and pain of his life, Walker still delivers to the world moments of joy so intense they seem supernatural. ‘Sometimes watching Walker,’ Brown writes, ‘is like looking at the moon: you see the face of the man in the moon, yet you know there’s actually no man there. But if Walker is so insubstantial, why does he feel so important? What is he trying to show me?’

The answers to these questions are hard-won and haunting. As Brown describes the life Walker lives and the way he and his family help him live it, first at home, and later in a special group house for disabled children, he never shies away from the humour or the intense pathos of life with his son.

With a tender imagination and stark honesty, Brown infuses The Boy in the Moon with the quality of love: for this amazing boy, for his family, and for life. As much as this book is about one frail boy and the tiny constellation of people who surround him, it is also about all of us who try so hard to be parents worthy of our children.

The Brain That Changes Itself: stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science: Revised edition

2010-03-01T00:00:00Z

An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age.

Psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge, MD, travelled around the United States to meet the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity, and the people whose lives they’ve transformed — people whose mental limitations or brain damage were previously seen as unalterable, and whose conditions had long been dismissed as hopeless.

We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole; a woman labelled retarded who cured her deficits with brain exercises and now cures those of others; blind people who learn to see; learning disorders cured; IQs raised; ageing brains rejuvenated; stroke patients recovering their faculties; children with cerebral palsy learning to move more gracefully; entrenched depression and anxiety disappearing; and lifelong character traits changed.

Doidge takes us onto terrain that might seem fantastic. We learn that our thoughts can switch our genes on and off, altering our brain anatomy. We learn how people of average intelligence can, with brain exercises, improve their cognition and perception, develop muscle strength, or learn to play a musical instrument — simply by imagining doing so.

Using personal stories from the heart of this neuroplasticity revolution, Dr Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.