Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Tapa dura

David Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation. (Richard Lloyd Parry New York Times)

His best to date. (David Mitchell)

'One of the most memorable stories in the book, the phantasmagoric "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom" [.] reads like something by Edgar Allan Poe set in Edwardian London with a Japanese protagonist, and concludes with a nod and a wink to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.' (Ian Samson Guardian)

'Replicates the curious but damaged psyche of its subject. . . a powerful study of story-telling.' (TLS)

'Beautiful, gothic and powerfully mysterious.' (Esquire)

'As a work of tribute, Patient X is superlative: exacting, precise and filled with the suffocating sense of foreboding generated by the mater's own best stories...Peace is not simply a masterfully controlled stylist but a magnificently atmospheric one, composing hypnotic collages.' (Andrew Dickson Financial Times)

'A book like this does have the reader questioning the reality or fictionality of other people...There are remarkable stories here, none more so than "The Exorcists" which, like so much of the book, is in part an examination of the transmission of faiths and cultures to societies that are, on the face of it, and on account of their inheritance, antipathetic...David Peace's stories have a lightness of touch even when they are dealing with grim or painful material.' (Scotsman)

'Peace's protagonist is drawn as a character utterly divided in multiple ways,
and, through the drone-like verbal motifs which echo and echo again in the prose, we find ourselves trapped inside his head, experiencing what he does as a kind of lucid madness.'

(The Skinny)

'Peace clearly knows and loves his subject and there are well-researched descriptions of earthquakes and illnesses, reminding us that he is a fantastically adept writer when he's keeping it real.' (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

'David Peace pays homage to a great Japanese writer with a riskily complex novel.' (Claire Lowden The Times)

'Beautiful, gothic and powerfully mysterious.' ESQUIRE 'One of the most original and intriguing books you'll read this year.' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'His best to date.' DAVID MITCHELL Ryunosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's great writers - author of the stories 'Rashomon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove', most famously - who lived through Japan's turbulent Taisho period of 1912 to 1926, including the devastating 1923 Earthquake, only to take his own life at the age of just thirty-five in 1927. These are the stories of Patient X in one of our iron castles. He will tell his tales to anyone with the ears and the time to listen - Inspired and informed by Akutagawa's stories, essays and letters, David Peace has fashioned a most extraordinary novel of tales. An intense, passionate, haunting paean to one writer, it also thrillingly explores the act and obsession of writing itself, and the role of the artist, both in public and private life, in times which darkly mirror our own.