WALKING WOUNDED

For fans of Richard Flanagan and Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, WALKING WOUNDED is a striking debut, meticulously researched, with huge depth and authenticity.

The novel is set in a large, understaffed and struggling psychiatric hospital outside London in the aftermath of WWII. The two central characters are David Reece, a young journalist-to-be whose wartime experiences in Burma have come back to haunt him violently; and Daniel Carter, one of the senior psychiatrists, a man who is fighting his own battles, as well as his patients'. The hospital itself is to close shortly, without adequate provision for those who are not yet ready for a return to outside life; and there is a growing enthusiasm amongst Daniel's superiors to use the radical new technique of Leucotomy (lobotomy) as a quick fix for all kinds of psychological illnesses, which Daniel finds abhorrent and unethical.

The outside world, both past and present, comes in and out of focus, as characters suddenly relive the brutality of their battlefield experiences. David tries to hold down employment in the Guardian office, and family and friends either make do or are forced to emigrate in the grey, desperate post-War world. But it's also a love story: David is sustained by his endlessly patient girlfriend as he mentally struggles to return to outside life. And it's a profound meditation on violence and how much harm it does to the perpetrator, including the medics themselves who are prepared to 'fix' their patients' problems surgically.

Sheila Llewellyn was born in England and now lives in Northern Ireland. She completed a PHD in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast in 2016. She has won the P J O'Connor RTÉ Radio One Drama Award and the Silver Award for the Best Broadcast Radio Drama in the New York International Radio Drama Festival in 2012. She has also been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, and shortlisted twice for the Costa Short Story Award.