Patient X

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.

David Peace - named in 2003 as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists - was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of eleven novels including the Red Riding Quartet, adapted for television by Channel Four in 2009, GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Damned Utd, Red or Dead, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, and most recently Tokyo Redux. He lives in Tokyo.