A moving and transformative journey into the most mysterious, heartbreaking, and awe-inspiring corners of the human mind

“One of the most unusual, beautiful, and poetic literary works on mental illness I’ve ever read.”
—Nicola Lagioia, La Repubblica

“Full of irony, intelligence, and lyricism.”
—Corriere della Sera

 “A powerful hymn to compassion towards ourselves and others.”
—Grazia (Italy)

We often speak of doctors as heroes, martyrs, or victims. Drawing from forty years of experience on an emergency psychiatric ward, Paolo Milone offers a more complex—and more compelling—picture. He transports us inside Ward 77, where mental illness coexists with the ordinary lives of those who, at the end of their shifts, take their white coats off. 

In this unsettling, absorbing, and transformative memoir Milone challenges many of our assumptions about mental health, as we follow nurses, doctors, and patients along the hospital corridors, and we enter the shattered lives of those living on both sides of the invisible, arbitrary bundary, that separates the healthy from the sick.

Told with humour and compassion, Paolo Milone’s English language debut is a work of striking humanity that conjures lasting beauty out of the darkness.

Paolo Milone
Paolo Milone was born in Genoa in 1954. He has worked as a psychiatrist for over forty years, first in a mental health clinic, then in an emergency psychiatric ward. The Art of Binding People is his first book.