About the Author

Ned Beauman was born in 1985 in London. His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel, Glow, was published in 2014. He has been chosen by The Culture Show as one of the twelve best new British novelists and by Granta as one of the 20 best British novelists under 40. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

Also by Ned Beauman

Boxer, Beetle

The Teleportation Accident

Glow

MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT

Ned Beauman

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Sceptre

An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Ned Beauman 2017

The right of Ned Beauman to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Quote from Heart of Darkness appears courtesy of The Estate of Orson Welles. Represented exclusively by Reeder Brand Management

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 473 61360 7

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Part One

Madness is better than defeat. Down the river is the light of reason.

(From Orson Welles’s screenplay for an unproduced adaptation of Heart of Darkness, 1939)