My year of rest and relaxation

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman's experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature.

Our narrator has many of the advantages of life, on the surface.

Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance.

But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn't just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?