num_pages: 308
description: In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther reaches of imagination, his doctors try to subdue him with ever more powerful drugs in a competition for his soul. In this provocative novel, Lessing takes us on a harrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind.
language: English
title: Briefing for a Descent into Hell
titlecomplete: Briefing for a Descent into Hell
genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Literature, Classics, Novels, Nobel Prize, Mental Illness, Fantasy, 20th Century
ratings_count: 2178
awards: awardedAt: 31564800000
name: Booker Prize
publisher: Knopf