A young man is gripped by one fear: that he'll lose his mind.

With depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia spread across his family tree, the odds are not in his favour. So, he does what any analytically minded man might do: he tries to calculate the statistical probability of his own madness. What follows is a restless, darkly comic journey - from New York to Paris to Vienna - as he tries to outrun a fate that seems written into his DNA, only to end up working as a psychologist inside the very institution he's spent his life fearing.

There, surrounded by stories that echo his own family's, he begins to see with a new, hard-earned clarity. In this bestselling German debut, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, Engler unravels a compassionate tale of reconciliation in which the protagonist is forced to confront a question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?