Writing from firsthand experience, the author offers an affecting meditation on art, mental fragility and faith

“What’s in your head?” Dolores O’Riordan’s raw, plaintive refrain loops through the Cranberries’ 1994 hit Zombie. A protest song about the Troubles could, on paper, hardly seem further removed from Derek Owusu’s third novel, about a young writer recovering from a mental health crisis. But in an author’s note before The Recovery House begins, Owusu instructs the reader to listen to the song “at least two to four times before going beyond this page”. Gradually it becomes clear that the song’s central question is one Owusu’s protagonist asks in various forms throughout the novel.

Can we ever fully understand what is going on in our own heads? We meet Jamal, a young novelist who has woken up in a recovery house – a residential alternative to hospital admission – after a breakdown. It transpires that he has overdosed,is an alcoholic, and has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. He is in a frazzled, frantic state, initially less interested in getting better than in piecing together how he got there.

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