Outside Looking In

One family's adventures in LSD: the brilliantly strange new novel from the mind of 'one of the most inventive; adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today' (Lionel Shriver) Chosen as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Herald It is Harvard in the early 1960s. Just off campus; Dr Timothy Leary plays host for his PhD students; laying on a spread of cocktails; pizza and LSD. Among the guests is Fitzhugh Loney; a psychology student; and his librarian wife Joanie. Married young; and both diligently and unglamorously toiling to support their son; they are not the sort of people one would expect to be seduced by the nascent drug culture. But their nights on LSD prove so extraordinary - so revelatory; so earth-shattering; so downright seductive - that Fitzhugh and Joanie are soon captive to the whims of the charismatic and subversive Dr Tim. Follow Fitzhugh and Joanie on their quest for transcendence; as sultry Mexican nights at Hotel Catalina give way to a ramshackle mansion in upstate New York; where thirty devotees - students; wives and children - play out the final act of a terrible; beautiful experiment. Join us; won't you? It's going to be one hell of a trip.