The Empathy Problem

Dear Reader

Life is short and time is precious, so thank you for taking a moment to look at my book.

There’s a famous(ish) story about a railroad engineer in Vermont who suffered a terrible brain injury. He was called Phineas Gage – it was the nineteenth century, obviously – and he was busy compacting gunpowder into a narrow hole using a metre-long iron tamping rod. There was a spark. There was an explosion. The tamping rod was fired through his head and later discovered some twenty-five metres away, sticking out of the earth like a javelin.

Despite losing a significant chunk of his brain (about ‘half a teacupful’, according to his doctor[*]), Gage survived; but his personality had changed. In the more moderate accounts, he went from being responsible, hard-working and polite to being impatient, reckless and disinhibited – ‘indulging at times in the grossest profanity’. In the more extreme accounts, ‘his society became intolerable to decent people’.

THE EMPATHY PROBLEM was conceived when I decided that it would be fun to ‘reverse’ the Gage scenario – to take a man who’s awful to begin with and give him a brain disorder that gradually redeems him (very much against his wishes).

My protagonist, Gabriel, doesn’t get anything fired through his head. He’s a sociopathic hedge fund manager whose brain tumour causes him to experience new and disconcerting emotions – love, guilt, compassion. I envisaged the story as being A CHRISTMAS CAROL but not set at Christmas and with brain cancer instead of ghosts. If that sounds interesting to you, then please read on. And if you like what you read, then I’d love to hear from you. (@GavinExtence). Any complaints can be directed to my publicist (ruby.mitchell@hodder.co.uk).

With very best wishes

Gavin

[*] I’ve no idea if this was a standard unit of measurement at the time, but it seems probable.