Instead he tries to do both, which unfortunately turns a potentially fascinating premise into a bland potboiler.

Although I would never have said it to Hunter, on reading the first few lines of the first document I caught a glimpse of something so clearly recognizable—the gait of a loved one on a distant hillside, the smell of my children's hair, the varied sensations evoked by my mother's cooking—that its authenticity seemed to me both undeniable and impossible to analyze. Like Theroux’s dystopian novel Far North, which I've also reviewed, Strange Bodies has many of the trappings of science-fiction, but this is almost incidental – genre-wise, this is literary fiction more akin to, say, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or the speculative works of Margaret Atwood than full-on sci-fi. The cornea in your eye gets its oxygen through the air when your eyes are open, and it receives some oxygen from other parts of the eye when your eyes are closed. Suffice it to say that Theroux harnesses the history of Russian utopianism as well as the life of Dr Johnson to the juggernaut of his plot, moving from scruffy south London to gleaming modern Moscow, mental hospital to Kazakhstan compound. I could hear an almost wistful note of surprise in my own voice when I remarked to Hunter that the letters appeared to be new to me.

In fact the first 75 pages or so seem to be a story of intrigue, maybe with forgers of primary documents. For some years, Hunter said, he had indulged a private passion for collecting memorabilia associated with famous English literary figures, particularly those of the Augustan and Romantic periods. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute his identity - the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds - and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness.

How this happens is kept from the reader for most of the book so I won't discuss it here, but don't read the publisher summary. A swipe at the Shakespeare authorship debate forms a counterpoint to the puzzle of Nicholas's identity: neatly, the book becomes an illustration of its own premise. And so, with the forensic gift for nuance that had made me a talented literary scholar and virtually hopeless at everything else, I saw the truth was a horrible reverse of the stereotype: on this occasion, the rich man cared only for literature, while the scholar was just in it for the money. Despite the 3 star rating I have given this book, I quite enjoyed it and would like to say its closer to 3. The relationship between stress and sleep is clear: When you’re stressed, your body releases cortisol, which initiates your body’s “fight or flight” response and keeps you alert.

Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human. Her legacy on earth was a marble urn near Streatham crematorium, a persistent smell of damp food in the room that had once been her scullery, and letters like this one that continued to offer her deals on cosmetics or inform her of her victory in prize draws. Astronomer Davide Farnocchia of the nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory was writing to one of us (Jewitt) about a new object in the sky with a very strange trajectory.

In the program he explored the country's post-Soviet problems including population decline, the growing AIDS epidemic and the persecution of the Meskhetian Turks.There was a huge obsession with Ben Johnson and I am not sure why and the main protagonist wasn't very likeable making it difficult for me to care when bad things happened. The doctor's bold claims were essentially unverifiable, as the lady they were addressed to had been dead for fourteen years. It's located in the Bethlem Royal Hospital, itself a lineal descendant of Bedlam, the notorious insane asylum that provided nugatory medical care for its inmates, but a rather higher standard of entertainment for the fashionable ladies and gentlemen who came to laugh at them.