Alcide is a writer in his forties. He takes seven pills a day - five in the morning, two after dinner - and still sometimes sleeps in his mother's bed. After years of psychiatric diagnoses, medications, compulsions and hallucinations, he recounts the grey monotony of his days and the terrifying moments when his mental equilibrium begins to tilt.

What follows is a reckoning with a mind at war with itself: a dazzling, darkly comic account of obsession, desire, family history and the fragile boundary between reality and delusion.

By turns harrowing, tender and startlingly alive, Unbalancing Act moves between medical records, childhood memories, philosophical reflections and scenes of extraordinary imaginative intensity to chronicle a consciousness determined to observe itself even as it comes apart. The result is a singularly literary portrait of psychic suffering and confirmation of Alcide Pierantozzi as one of the most original voices in contemporary Italian writing.