A searingly honest, heartbreaking work of genius, this is a book about music, poetry, devastating illness, creativity, sex and drugs, and twenty-something life in New York

'Writing this rawly self-conscious has no business captivating you, let alone moving you. That it manages to do it anyway is a testament to Mr. Cody's talent, honesty, and singularity' Jonathan Franzen

'The memoir of the year. It's a sensorium, and a painful one, a book in which the sentences swing into you like small, gleaming axes ... He has a blazing intellect and can really write' New York Times, Books of the Year

Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant.

In a fevered, mesmerising voice, slaloming effortlessly between references to Ezra Pound, The Rolling Stones and Beethoven, in a memoir that is as fresh and beguiling as it is brave and revealing he charts the struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, the ruthless grasping for life, for sensation.

Literary, hallucinatory and at times uncomfortable reading, [sic] is ultimately a celebration of art, language music and life.