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Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. After graduating from Cambridge University in modern languages, his first chosen career was journalism, principally with the Mirror Group, a career interrupted in the mid-80s by a nervous breakdown and the diagnosis of a drink problem. Campbell worked his way back to become a political editor and when Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, he asked Campbell to be his press secretary. He worked for Blair - first in that capacity, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy - from 1994 to 2003, and returned in 2005 to help Labour win a third election. He now splits his time between writing, speaking, consultancy and charity, as chairman of fundraising for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, and a leading ambassador for the mental health campaign, Time to Change. He lives in North London with his partner of 33 years, Fiona Millar. They have three children. His interests include running, cycling, bagpipes and Burnley Football Club. He has published five volumes of diaries, including the bestselling The Blair Years, a memoir on depression, The Happy Depressive, a novel about fame, Maya, and his first acclaimed novel about mental illness, All in the Mind.
A psychiatrist wrestles with his clients' demons - and his own - in the first novel from Tony Blair's former spokesperson.Campbell (The Blair Years, 2007, etc.) set the bar high for his fiction debut, attempting to get inside the heads of numerous patients served by Martin Sturrock, one of London's premier shrinks. And he often pulls it off; the book contains many virtuoso passages that reflect a rich understanding of depression and its victims. Martin's clients include Ralph, whose alcoholism is derailing his career as a senior health minister; Emily, a former teacher living in seclusion since a fire disfigured her face; Arta, a refugee from Kosovo who was raped after moving to England; David, a young working-class man wracked by anxiety; and Matthew, whose affairs have prompted his wife to label him a sex addict. Experienced and middle-aged, Martin can almost treat them on autopilot; he assigns homework reading, suggests that they keep dream diaries, asks the proper questions. But after he tells Arta she must forgive the men who raped her, she flees, sparking a weekend's worth of self-flagellation over his own shortcomings, not least his patronage of prostitutes. Ultimately, Campbell fails to construct a tenable plot from all this. Numerous threads connect all too neatly at the novel's tragic climax, and the final pages shift into easy melodrama. Before that, though, he crafts some top-notch characterizations. A patient walk-through of Ralph's day, drink by drink, exposes the emotional and physical devastation he's sown in himself, and Arta's post-rape fear of human interaction is handled with a smart mix of empathy and cold realism. These achievements make the clumsy closing chapters all the more frustrating. The author clearly wants to make a case for the complexity and value of psychiatry, but late-stage mawkishness strips the book of its power.Campbell has a talent for imagining lost souls, but he needs a story worthy of them. (Kirkus Reviews)
