Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search For The Meanings of Madness

In a Victorian-era German asylum, seamstress Agnes Richter painstakingly stitched a mysterious autobiographical text into every inch of the jacket she created from her institutional uniform. Despite every attempt to silence them, hundreds of other psychiatric patients have managed to get their stories out, or to publish them on their own.

This is an autobiography from which the author, award-winning writer Simon Barnes, has been surgically removed. He has reported on six World Cups, seven Olympic Games, cricket on five continents and more than 20 Wimbledons, watching Diego Maradona, Usain Bolt, Sachin Tendulkar and Roger Federer at their peak. Along the way he had soul-revealing conversations with Ayrton Senna and sat on Desert Orchid.