Mayhem

Fierce, lyrical, and lucid memoir

Fierce, lyrical, and lucid memoir

A profoundly articulate and harrowing memoir of a family grappling with addiction... I was impressed and moved

A short, intense and moving memoir ... a poignant and at times harrowing account that testifies to the resilience of the human spirit

Powerful and spare ... her elisions and prevarications have a striking effect

Such a unique and haunting story to tell

What gives this book its astonishing power is not the guilt, but the intelligence and literary skill . Beautifully structured... Rausing sets the scene with painterly delicacy and then steps back to analyse the implications of what she has revealed

A deeply felt memorial to a lost brother... a finely written memoir

Riveting, clear-sighted and exceptionally articulate ...heartbreaking...her literary and psychoanalytic fluency gives the book an impact that feels arrestingly honest

Touched by its bravery, sincerity and the frequent beauty of the writing

In this slim, stoic memoir... Rausing thoughtfully, painstakingly, works a deep groove into the stubborn surface of certain bedevilling questions: "How do you write about addiction?"... I nodded and sometimes cried . I wanted to invite the author over for tea

Sigrid Rausing is the editor of Granta magazine and the publisher of Granta Books. She is the author of two previous books: History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia , and Everything is Wonderful , which was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.
She is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and of St Antony's College, Oxford. She lives in London.