num_pages: 228
description: by Sarah Barter ISBN 13: 978 1 84747 010 2Published: 2006Pages: 226 Description This is a story about love, psychology and mental illness. A work of fiction or is it ? About the Author Sarah Barter hails from Stafford in the West Midlands. She attended an all girls' boarding school and went on to study English Literature at Cardiff University gaining both an BA and an MA. She is now a school teacher having taught in comprehensives in Manchester, Reading, High Wycombe and Solihull. She had a promising career and was fulfilling her goals of finding out how to deal with social inequality. But one day, the discipline and the paperwork got too much and she left teaching to take up a fleet of unpaid jobs. Then very suddenly her life changed again, she was diagnosed with polymorphic psychosis. Since then, she has had fits and traumas and has had to adapt to be able to fit back into her life. As well as writing her second book Sarah is now working with her father and looking to get back into full time work - possibly teaching. Book Extract On the ward, it is hot, and dusty. Penny has decided to quit her high profile job, and get in touch with her inner person. She works in the Loch Ness hospital full time now and it is a home for mentally confused patients, but she also has patients who are elderly. She sits down at a table in the rest room, and writes with the TV talking softly while the contestants battle it out to win prizes on the quiz show. She leans forward with her head on her arms and then after a big breath, she starts writing. She never thought she would be a writer and it does not come naturally. She blows on her fist and shakes the pen, as if this will wake it up. Then she gets started. She has really got started this time. She pushes her hair out of her eyes and leans on her elbows in the hot, airless room. At about the same time, Andrew is in on a new deal which entails a decision, the outcome of which ends in him calling Penny to 'The Museum of Beautiful Things' to work as a medical assistant and a freelance researcher. As has already been mentioned, he is far too busy and important a man to do work on data himself, although he is not averse to getting the hoover out and giving the smooth cream carpets in the corridor a quick vac if they need it. Numbers have gone up by the zillions since he had a museum piece about popular music. There are some very much more lucrative fish to fry out there, and it will be criminal if he is not to buy our culture a share of the real action, he thinks. It will be a mutually advantageous agreement. You see, Andrew has been approached by a group of 'Big Thinkers'. He is really too young for this but responsibility seems to fall on young shoulders. He is very handsome, and as the M.D. of the 'Museum of Beautiful Things' he is quite an important man in the city. They, (the group of 'Big Thinkers'), want to make the Health Services, and the issues surrounding it, the center of an exhibition of conceptual art with relation to mental health in particular. I know, you thought 'The Museum of Beautiful Things' had closed down on Penny, due to her lack of powers of information retrieval. Well, it has. In the city. But it has reopened in the rural area where Dandelions on the roundabouts are yellow and clocks all at the same time. 'The Museum of Beautiful Things' is combining forces with the Big Thinkers, as private investors, with the idea of making the N.H.S. successful in this area. For this reason, to help people to hold onto their money, and to make sure he has someone who has experience herself, Andrew decides he needs Penny's mature and experienced thinking and he asks for her ideas. And things are not going too well with Corrina.
language: English
title: The Conspiracy Theorist's Alphabet
titlecomplete: The Conspiracy Theorist's Alphabet
publisher: Chipmunkapublishing