Tormented Hope

'It's so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down' - Hilary Mantel, Guardian Books of the Year Brian Dillon looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping. With a new afterword on Michael Jackson. Brian Dillon's first book, In the Dark Room, won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction in 2006. He lives in Canterbury.

Brian Dillon is the author of In the Dark Room, a memoir that won the Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2005, andTormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009. He teaches at the Royal College of Art.