The Bullet - by Tom Lee

Book Synopsis

But among those people were, at different times, Tom's own parents. Afterwards, those times were not much spoken about and before long the hospital closed, as part of the nationwide shutting down of psychiatric institutions. For many years, Tom believed that he had dodged the bullet of the mental illness that had marked the lives of his parents. But then, quite out of the blue, he has a crisis of his own and finds himself returning to the past for clues.

The Bullet is an attempt to piece together and understand what happened to his parents and what happened to him. It is also a story about how we have tried and spectacularly failed to care for people suffering with mental illness, and about the terrifying fragility and unknowability of the human mind.