Outside Looking In
One family’s adventures in LSD: the brilliantly strange new novel from the mind of ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver)
Chosen as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Herald
It is Harvard in the early 1960s. Just off campus, Dr Timothy Leary plays host for his PhD students, laying on a spread of cocktails, pizza and LSD. Among the guests is Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology student, and his librarian wife Joanie. Married young, and both diligently and unglamorously toiling to support their son, they are not the sort of people one would expect to be seduced by the nascent drug culture. But their nights on LSD prove so extraordinary – so revelatory, so earth-shattering, so downright seductive – that Fitzhugh and Joanie are soon captive to the whims of the charismatic and subversive Dr Tim.
Follow Fitzhugh and Joanie on their quest for transcendence, as sultry Mexican nights at Hotel Catalina give way to a ramshackle mansion in upstate New York, where thirty devotees – students, wives and children – play out the final act of a terrible, beautiful experiment.
Join us, won’t you? It’s going to be one hell of a trip.
T. C. Boyle is the New York Times-bestselling author of sixteen novels including The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, San Miguel and The Terranauts, and eleven collections of stories. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages. He is the recipient most recently of the Jonathan Swift Prize, the Mark Twain Voice in American Literature Award and the Henry David Thoreau Award. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in California.
tcboyle.com