A decade ago I fell ill,' writes Inga Clendinnen at the beginning of Tiger's Eye. 'Fall is the right word; it is almost as alarming and quite as precipitous as falling in love.'

In this deeply personal memoir an eminent historian explores her own history. She dramatises the ways in which illness challenges and subverts the self, and explores how writing can become part of the imperative to recover. This is an absorbing and lucid account of the mind at particular extremities: of razor-sharp recollection, of weird hallucinatory narratives and of heightened creativity. It is a book about the transitions between memory and history and fiction, and how the liberated imagination negotiates its way among them. Vivid and compelling, the subject of Tiger's Eye is not being ill or well, but being alive.

'Tiger's Eye is an exhilarating and poignant book ... brilliant in it energy and its depth of self-revelation. Its wildness and disarray are textured and transforming.' Peter Craven, ABR