2011

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

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.