Faber announces The Heartland – the second book by Nathan Filer

Faber is thrilled to be publishing Nathan Filer’s highly anticipated second book, The Heartland: finding and losing schizophrenia. A powerful work of non-fiction, it is the follow-up to his Costa Book of the Year debut novel, The Shock of the Fall.

Louisa Joyner, Editorial Director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, plus EU, excluding Canada, from Sophie Lambert at C+W.

In The Heartland, Nathan Filer, a former mental health nurse, invites us to spend time in the company of some extraordinary people whose lives have been affected by this most strange of human conditions, and to discover their complex, surprising, painful, funny and ultimately relatable stories. Interlacing these first-person encounters with a series of meditative essays, he debunks myths, challenges orthodoxy and offers fresh insight into what is traditionally considered to be psychiatry’s heartland: the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia.

Just as The Shock of the Fall did, The Heartland will illuminate our perception and transform lives.

The Heartland is an important contribution to our understanding of and relationship to schizophrenia – an illness that sits at the heart of our cultural, social and individuated relationships to mental health. To be working together with Nathan again is a true joy and Faber & Filer are going to be a peerless combination. Louisa Joyner, Editorial Director

Stephen Page, CEO, said: ‘Faber could not be more delighted to welcome Nathan, not least with this brilliant, necessary book.’ Nathan Filer said: ‘I am delighted to be working with Louisa Joyner again. She was the perfect editor for The Shock of the Fall and is bringing the same intelligence, compassion and vision to The Heartland, which to me feels like a natural sequel. I’m also hugely grateful (and more than a bit humbled) that this book has found a home with Faber – I could hardly be in better company.’

Nathan Filer is a qualified mental health nurse. The Shock of the Fall, his novel about the life of a young man grieving the loss of his brother, has sold over half a million copies in the UK, was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It won the Costa Book of the Year, the Betty Trask Prize, the National Book Award for Popular Fiction and the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel. He has written for the Guardian and the New York Times. His BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Mind in the Media, which explored portrayals of mental illness in fiction and journalism, was shortlisted for a Mind Media Award. He’s currently a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.