A crackling, tender, and perfectly off-kilter novel about love, madness, illness, and recovery.Vita Woods is on the brink. She has a good job in London and a successful doctor boyfriend, Max, with whom the sex is great and the future promising. Her sister, Gracie, is brilliant yet unreliable, her best friend and sparring partner; and she has a goldfish, Whitney Houston, a fantail who brightens even her darkest days. Because, as much as things are going right, the days are dark. Vita is not leaving the house. In fact, she rarely makes it out of bed.Instead, she spends long hours in “The Pit”—a place of deep exhaustion and semi-consciousness, dead to the world and to herself. Vita has been sick for months with an illness that no doctor, not even Max, can diagnose. And recently, her only companion, Luigi, has started showing up at her bedside, bringing snacks, romantic advice, and the promise of release. The issue is that he may be a ghost, an apparition of her sickly mind.Then, an unexpected mix-up pushes her into the path of her upstairs neighbors. As Vita finds friendship—and perhaps more—in the apartment above, she keeps sneaking up to see them, but something about her “condition” is nagging at the edges of her mind. What if the problem is Vita herself? Because as far as anyone can prove…there’s nothing wrong with her.
