Lendle

‘Malcolm is a little unwell’ is the shocking, gripping narrative of Malcolm Brabant’s descent into madness caused by a routine yellow fever vaccination. The book chronicles a Kafkaesque journey through insanity during which Brabant first believes he is the Messiah and later, the Devil. He imagines he is visited by guardian angels, close friends and relatives who died premature deaths, and who set him impossible tasks to prove that he was the Chosen One. At his lowest point, certain he is possessed by Lucifer while in a locked psychiatric ward, Brabant, an award winning veteran BBC foreign correspondent, attempts suicide in order to save the world. His illness causes him to lose his job as the Corporation’s Athens correspondent, and his family comes within a whisker of being homeless. As doctors try to find the right combination of medication to cure his fried brain, Brabant’s wife Trine struggles to restore him to the alpha male husband she married while taking on Sanofi Pasteur, the pharmaceutical manufacturer of the yellow fever jab. Her love and anger are the driving forces as the family struggles to crawl from the abyss and embarks on a David versus Goliath battle to win justice. Malcolm Brabant’s voice and face are recognised around the globe from his 25 years of distinctive reporting for the BBC World Service and BBC World TV. His book will resonate not just in Britain, but in the rest of the world, because it uniquely and articulately describes what it’s like to go mad.