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A Granta Best Young British Novelist

Jamal, a gifted and introspective young poet, wakes in a quiet, claustrophobic recovery house after a devastating mental breakdown, unsure how the bright edges of his life became so fractured. In this stark yet strangely tender sanctuary, with its watchful nurses, restless corridors and overlooked garden, he encounters several wounded, but radiant souls who are each wrestling with their own invisible storms. As Jamal navigates this suspended world, at once suffocating and strangely sacred, he begins to observe rather than retreat, finding in the rhythms of shared cigarettes, half-finished conversations and midnight confessions a hesitant, flickering sense of belonging.

Within these intimate, volatile walls, music drifts like prayer. A song sung into the dark becomes a fragile lifeline. Psalms are read aloud with trembling conviction. Laughter erupts, unexpected and defiant. Jamal’s searching, philosophical mind moves restlessly between memory and imagination, literature and scripture, doubt and devotion, interrogating the porous boundaries between illness and inspiration. What does it mean to hear a voice and call it God, or art, or madness? What is salvation in a place built to contain collapse? In the charged silence of the garden, under watchful skies, he begins to sense that joy can exist even here, braided through grief, carried on melody, sustained by human touch.
Tender, intelligent and spiritually inquisitive, The Recovery House is a novel about the music that survives inside us when language falters, about the redemptive possibilities of friendship, and about the delicate courage required to rebuild a self. As Jamal reckons with love, faith, shame and the perilous seduction of turning life into art, he is forced to confront the most difficult question of all: how to live honestly in the world without sacrificing the soul that makes him want to write it.

'I loved this beautiful book' SARAH BERNSTEIN
'A compelling and deeply engaging read' DANIEL LAWRENCE TAYLOR
'I loved it’ KRYSTELLE BAMFORD
'The Recovery House is a masterclass in storytelling. I was mesmerised from start to finish… I’ve never read anything like it and I don’t think I ever will. The Recovery House is perfect' ORE AGBAJE-WILLIAMS
'A prescient novel, which captures very powerfully the surreal space and mundane routines of an institution. Owusu has drawn that desolate situation so poignantly' SARA BAUME
'An impressively vulnerable novel - I read it in one sitting and immediately went back to page one to read it again' VARAIDZO
'Derek Owusu is the real deal, and The Recovery House is his best work yet' KEIRAN GODDARD

© Derek Owusu 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026