Pharmakon, or the Story of a Happy Family : a Novel

"It is 1950s America and madness is in the air. In a world where the `cures' for craziness include coma therapy, cyanide treatment and full-frontal lobotomies, Dr. William T. Friedrich, a young and ambitious psychology professor at Yale, stumbles upon a tropical plant that seems to possess the secret ingredient of happiness. In Casper Gedsic, a fiercely intelligent, socially inept, near-suicidal maths student, he seems to have found the perfect guinea pig. But when his experiments goes awry, Casper's thirst for revenge turns murderous and his actions have consequences that will haunt Friedrich and his family forever..." From the author of Fierce People comes a blistering, haunting, aching novel about what you do when the unthinkable happens - and when the memory of it refuses to be left behind "I was born because a man came to kill my father."