Madness

'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know'. Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. A woman obsessed with punctuality makes a fateful decision, a wronged woman takes revenge on her dead husband, a cat's curious behaviour comes between a husband and his wife. . . Madness highlights a domestic familiarity always on the edge of something much, much darker. In these ten unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity. Collected together for the first time, stories include Edward the Conqueror, Katina, The Sound Machine, An African Story, The Landlady, Pig, The Boy Who Talked with Animals, Dip in the Pool, William and Mary and The Way Up to Heaven. Dahl understood our deepest secrets, desires and fears and Madness is one of four books - the rest being Lust, Cruelty and Deception - that explore our hidden selves. ‘He finds the child in the adult and the adult in the child and, with a little smile, he sticks the knife in both’ – Anthony Horowitz