The Blackbird Singularity
by Matt Wilven
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Pub Date 1 Aug 2016 | Archive Date 14 Sep 2016
Description
Shortlisted for an Amazon Rising Star Award
Longlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize 2016
Selected for WHSmith Fresh Talent 2017
Wilven does a masterful job of keeping his readers as off-balance as his protagonist... an intense and satisfyingly off-beat examination of a man lost in a landscape of unresolved grief and his heroic fight to find his way back home.' -- Melissa DeCarlo, author of The Art of Crash Landing
Vince stops taking his lithium when he finds out about his partner's pregnancy. As withdrawal kicks in, he can barely hold his life together.
Somewhere between making friends with a blackbird in the back garden and hearing his dead son's footsteps in the attic, he finds himself lost and alone, journeying through a world of chaos and darkness, completely unaware of the miracle that lies ahead.
Featuring a foreword from Dr Eleanor Longdon; Dr Longden's TED talk, Learning From the Voices in my Head, was featured on the front page of The Huffington Post and has been named by The Guardian newspaper as one of 'the 20 online talks that could change your life.'; It has been viewed over 3m times and translated into 36 languages.
Available Editions
EDITION | Ebook |
ISBN | 9781785079696 |
PRICE | £4.99 (GBP) |
Featured Reviews
The Blackbird Singularity is beautifully written, I feel that I've discovered a new favourite author in Matt Wilven.
Matt Wilven does a wonderful thing with The Blackbird Singularity; he makes mental illness approachable and real. Vince, a writer, stops taking his medication when he finds out that his wife is pregnant. He hopes that he can be the person that he knows is underneath all the chemicals but, is truly afraid that person is lost to him forever. He forges an expected friendship with a blackbird as the withdrawal from his medication begins to set in. Slowly, Vince loses his grip on reality, eventually driving his wife back to the home of her judgmental parents. All Vince wants is to prove that he can be a functioning person without medication but can he really? Wilven sends his reader down the same dark path, wondering if the protagonist will ever recover or if the road to redemption is a delusion. I thought this book was beautifully written and haunting. The end will make you gasp, cry, and, finally, smile. For such dark subject matter, Wilven masterfully directs his reader through the narrative to a place of lightness and hope. A must read for lovers of The Silver Linings Playbook.