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Neurologist Pria Anand’s The Mind Electric: Stories of the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains has gone to Virago following a “hotly contested” five-way auction.
Anna Kelly acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Emma Finn at C&W on behalf of Veronica Goldstein at UTA. UK publication is scheduled for 5th June 2025.
The publisher’s description states: “A young woman channelling the voice of the Holy Spirit. A mother whose children have been replaced by changelings. A family cursed by a mysterious inability to sleep. Pria Anand’s patients come to her with myriad peculiar symptoms, but they all have something in common: their diagnosis always hinges on a story.” Her task as a neurologist is “akin to a detective’s, piecing together the clues in a patient’s account with the tells of their body to uncover the story of their illness and help them to heal.”
The publisher adds: “In her beautifully written and humane first book, Pria Anand shares stories of her own patients alongside her own experiences as a doctor, a mother and a patient, and demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that the strangest symptoms experienced by any single individual can show us something universal about being human.”
Kelly said: “Like Oliver Sacks before her, Pria Anand has a gift for compelling storytelling and wise insights, and this book is warm, compassionate and endlessly fascinating.”
Anand, a neurologist at the Boston Medical Center and an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, said: “I cannot imagine a more fitting UK home than Virago for The Mind Electric. Virago is a luminary press that is redefining the landscape of literature by championing women’s voices.”