The second novel from the author of the Man Booker-longlisted Communion Town
In February of 1935, two young Irishmen walk in the grounds of a London mental hospital. Arthur Bourne, a junior psychiatrist, is about to jeopardise his future for his closest friend, an aspiring writer called Louis Molyneux.
Arthur has been overshadowed since childhood by his brilliant, troubled friend. But after years of playing the unassuming companion, he is learning that loyalty has its costs: that old friendship may thwart new love, and perhaps even blur distinctions between the sane and the mad . . .
JOTT is a story about friendship, madness and modernism from the author of the Man Booker-longlisted Communion Town.
A complex, nuanced literary novel of extraordinary perception - The Herald
A shrewd portrait of a particular kind of male friendship, simultaneously intense and incomplete - Mail on Sunday
Engaging - Irish Times
In Jott [Thompson] shows another simpler life where one focuses on helping others and on developing relationships rather than on the self-absorbed perspective of the struggling writer . . . it is in the depiction of Beckett as Louis where this story comes most alive - Irish Examiner
A touching and thoughtful portrait - TLS