[1] The stream-of-consciousness novel tells the story of a psychiatrist Zack Busner and his treatment of a patient at Friern Hospital in 1971 who has encephalitis lethargica and has been in a vegetative state since 1918, when she was a munitions worker.

[2] In the final element of the story, in 2010 the asylum is no longer in existence and the recently retired Busner travels across north London trying to find the truth about his experience with his patient.

[4] Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Sheena Joughlin wrote... Every experience is filtered through another, or infiltrated by it.

At times, this Self-imposed exile from any “fixed regard”, threatens the narrative’s sanity, and its readability, but that is the point.

To frame it in terms of the film Gremlins, if you fed Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child after midnight, it might come out looking a bit like Umbrella[6]