Winner 2011

The third Wellcome Trust Book Prize has been awarded to Alice LaPlante for her debut novel ‘Turn of Mind’, a tale of a family’s secrets exposed by murder and a brilliant mind in terminal decline. It is the first work of fiction to win the Prize, triumphing ahead of Philip Roth’s study of a polio epidemic in wartime Newark, ‘Nemesis’, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer, ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’.

'Turn of Mind' (Random House, Harvill Secker) is written from the perspective of Dr Jennifer White, an eminent former surgeon in the final stages of Alzheimer's who comes under suspicion after the murder of her best friend. As the novel progresses, our narrator's mind collapses as she enters the last stages of dementia.

While her world falls apart, the investigation into the murder of her friend, Amanda, uncovers her family's darkest secrets. The mounting investigation and the ravages of disease both exert their pressures upon Dr White and the story pulls the reader in, building to a thrilling climax. LaPlante's superbly evocative first-person narrative brings the reality of Alzheimer's to life.

Clare Matterson, Director of Medical Humanities and Engagement at the Wellcome Trust, said: "Alice LaPlante's debut novel is a well-deserved winner of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. It's a gripping, intricately plotted, and profoundly moving novel that takes the reader deep inside the mind of someone whose memories are being eroded by Alzheimer's. As with all the books shortlisted for the Prize, it has something both interesting and important to say about the place of medicine and disease in our lives."