Hallucinating Foucault was winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award 1996 and the McKitterick Prize Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award To coincide with publication of her new novel Miss Webster and Cherif

In this ravishing tale of sexual and textual obsession, the young unnamed narrator sets forth from Cambridge on a quest. He is to rescue the subject of his doctoral research, Paul Michel, the brilliant but mad writer, from incarceration in a mental institution in France. What ensues is a drama of terrible intimacy and tenderness played out one hot and humid summer in Paris and in the south of France. "Hallucinating Foucault" is a literary thriller that explores with consummate mastery the passionate relationship between reader and writer, between the factual and the fictional, between sanity and madness. In blurring these boundaries, Patricia Duncker has written a novel of astonishing power and beauty.