A PULITZER PRIZE 2024 FINALIST FOR MEMOIR

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2023

ONE OF THE GUARDIAN AND PROSPECT'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR


ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, ATLANTIC, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL’S TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

'Extraordinary... Magisterial... A remarkable meditation on friendship, success, madness and violence that refuses to oversimplify' Guardian (Book of the Day)

'The darkest of literary triumphs, and the most gripping of unbearable reads' Telegraph (5 stars)

A novelist's gripping investigation of the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University.

Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll. Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.

"'Extraordinary... A remarkable meditation on friendship, success, madness and violence that refuses to oversimplify ... A magisterial work, as much a sociological study of late 20th-century America as it is a book about madness. Despite weighing in at more than 500 pages, the narrative scarcely drags thanks to Rosen's style, which is easygoing, but spiced with moments of pin-sharp brilliance.'" - Guardian (Book of the Day)

"Rosen is a novelist, and his literary imagination shapes the book like a novel... This artful, reflective and even entertaining book - one of the best of this or any year - is his powerful effort to take responsibility for changing minds, to persuade us of the danger of allowing compassion to obscure truth. The Best Minds manages to honour both" - TLS

"The darkest of literary triumphs, and the most gripping of unbearable reads. Five stars" - Telegraph

"An act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph... A brave and nuanced book" - New York Times

"Extraordinary... It's just so superbly written. I highly recommend it" - Radio 5 Live

"Almost every page is filled with poignant observations, subtle ironies and a commentary pregnant with the unbearable weight of future knowledge... This is a rich and deeply thoughtful book about the nature of madness and the way that western society deals with it" - Observer

"An astounding piece of work, at once a portrait of Laudor made of countless fine brush strokes, a tender memoir of adolescence and young adulthood and, above all, a forensic, unflinching exploration of the factors that led to Laudor's public rise and bloody fall" - The Times

"A poignant account of friendship... The writing is smart and zippy, laying all the emotions bare... an engrossing, passionate and balanced book - both a plea for the humane management of a most misunderstood disease and a haunting account of a friendship that ended in tragedy" - Spectator

"A beautifully written meditation on society's inability to cope with the problem of mental illness" - Atlantic

"This searching memoir retraces their relationship, meditating on how separate fates intertwine and diverge. Right when Michael’s life seems to be improving, he murders his fiancée. For the author, the questions about his friend deepen, while the answers recede." - WSJ The 10 Best Books of 2023

"The tragic story of Rosen's childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, whose brilliant academic career was cut short by a psychotic illness that led him to commit a horrific act of violence" - Guardian

"Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting" - Wall Street Journal

"The story Rosen tells is a damning critique of the utopian thinking that blinded so many admirers of Michael’s mind. It is also a joint bildungsroman, a remarkably honest and poignant account of an intense friendship between two boys coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, who thrived on sometimes fond, sometimes fraught adolescent competition. The Best Minds combines urgency and subtlety in the way it handles the interrelated issues of mental-health stigma, personal freedom, and forced institutionalization" - The Atlantic

"Could be the best book of the year... Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds takes its title from Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and could end up as just as enduring a work of American writing. Expect to see it on "Best Of" lists, and plan to make space for its nearly 600 pages on your shelf. A memoir, a love letter, and a biblical tragedy all at once, it avoids easy answers but clings to difficult questions. A tale told with humility, it charts the path to hell by noting every good intention along the way" - New York Sun

"The often-cited fine line between madness and genius lies at the heart of this powerfully affecting memoir in which US novelist and non-fiction writer Rosen tells the shattering story of how a diagnosis of schizophrenia led his childhood best friend Michael Laudor from the heights of academic stardom and a major film and publishing deal, to a psychiatric hospital, and eventually to commit a horrific crime. An "American tragedy" but one with universal relevance, it combines a tender and touching story of friendship with a brutal indictment of how we neglect the mentally ill in our society at our peril" - The Bookseller

"As a primer to the cultural and political concerns that emerged from the Sixties, it is second to none ... Like all great American texts it is the detail and the flow of ideas that gives it power. This is social and intellectual history of the most powerful sort" - The Tablet