One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
By Ken Kesey.
Paperback.
First published 1962.
Published by Picador.
ISBN 13: 9780774033442
ISBN 10: 0774033444
ASIN: 0774033444
Description:
An international
bestseller and the basis for the hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the defining works of the 1960s.
In this classic novel,
Ken Kesey’s hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving
rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty,
life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by
challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the
ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn.
But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle,
an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the
full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will.
What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy
provides the story’s shocking climax.
Tyrannical Nurse Ratched
rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending
routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication
and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the
arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin
who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle
is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient
who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that
keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant,
ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and
madness.
“BRILLIANT!”
– Time.