Umbrella by Will Self

This is a difficult book to follow--it is the sort of book that my spouse thinks of when he thinks of the Man Booker prize (which this was short listed for in 2012).  It is stream of conscious, covering three distinct time periods, including a long stretch in a mental institution.  To complicate things further, there are not chapters, no breaks between time periods.  You just have to ride the tide of the book from beginning to end and hope that you can keep up with the story along the way.  There are paragraph breaks, but they really do not help all that much.  If you though Ulysses was impossible, this is not the book for you.  If you feel like you have to know exactly where the book is going and where it has been, then this book is not for you.  But if you like the way words sound and fit together, and you can let the rest of it go, then you might just enjoy this. 

The book is largely set in a mental institution in 1971.  A psychiatrist, Zach Busner, is taking care of a long term patient, Audrey Death (yes, there is a sense of irony in an author named Self writing about a subject named Death).  She has been catatonic and Busner suspects that schizophrenia may not be her primary diagnosis.  The other prominent thread is what are more or less flashbacks to Audrey's life around WWI, the War to End All Wars, especially for the British, who underwent monumental changes post-WWI to the point where it appears to have a role in every major British novel, and this one is no exception.  The book is decidedly unusual, and much more pleasant than I am making it sound.