Tiger's Eye: A Memoir

'A decade ago I fell ill,' writes Inga Clendinnen. '"Fall" is the right word; it is almost as alarming and quite as precipitous as falling in love.' In this deeply personal book she takes us on a journey into dangerous territory in which her body, her mind and her life itself are irrevocably changed.

Waiting for the mysterious interventions of medical science, Clendinnen becomes fascinated with her new existence in the sealed world of hospital. And, as she waits, she begins to write: about her childhood, her parents, her own history. She recovers half-forgotten stories and invents new ones, exploring and mapping the obscure terrain that divides history from fiction and truth from memory.

TIGER'S EYE is a mesmerising book. With its vivid recollections, its weird hallucinatory narratives, its accounts of failing consciousness and heightened creativity, it is a book about how illness challenges the self and how the disabling of the body can liberate the imagination. Lucid, fearless, passionate and wise, its true subject is being alive.