Just Released in Penguin Paperback

H

a novel by

Elizabeth Shepard



"A triumph ... An unsentimental portrait of an emtionally disturbed child ... [that never] loses sight of one child's pain."*

    - Alice McDermott, The New York Times Book Review

To his mother, twelve-year-old Benjamin Sherman is an object of pity and anxiety. To his father, he is bizarre and embarrassing. To his psychiatrist, he is a case study in mental illness. To the counselors at the camp where he is spending his summer, Benjamin is a "freaky kid" who shuns his peers and is strangely - and perhaps dangerously - attached to his best friend Elliot, a stuffed letter H.

Through the letters of his sister, mother, father, camp counselors, and psychiatrist - and, most touchingly through those Benjamin writes to Elliot - this audacious and utterly unsentimental novel gives us a moving and sometimes shocking intimacy with a child whose disorder may be a kind of fragile genius. H is an astute, sympathetic evocation of the state we persist in calling madness.

Recommended reading by the National Mental Health Association,
H is taught in many high school and college classrooms.

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Cover design: Georgie Stout
Cover photograph: Barry Marcus
Photo of Elizabeth: Marion Ettlinger