Fill the World

<p>'A divine monologue of hallucinatory clarity' Luke Kennard, author of <i>Black Bag</i><br><b><i><br>Even the greyest world contains within it more colour than a mortal heart can bear.</i></b></p><p>1973. In a plain room in St Augustine's Home for the Aged and Infirm, Chicago, a life is drawing to a close. Isolated and eccentric, Henry Darger has spent his days shuffling between his apartment, daily Mass and the hospital where he worked as a janitor, occasionally scouring bins and kerbsides for newspaper clippings and treasures to add to his collection.</p><p>The world has not noticed Henry Darger. But he has noticed the world - seen the seismic changes industrialisation and urbanisation have brought to twentieth-century America; seen two world wars, hypocrisy, violence and loss of innocence. And finding the outside world to be little more than a vista of cruelty and concrete, he has dedicated his life to creating his own: a vast universe in which the Vivian Girls fight against the forces of evil in the Realms of the Unreal ...</p><p>Unknown during his lifetime, Darger's work is now considered to be an iconic example of American outsider art, its apocalyptic visions as disturbing as they are compelling. <i>Fill the World</i> takes us deep into the mind of its creator, in a novel that is shocking, mysterious and ablaze with otherworldly colour.</p>