DIRK WITTENBORN

William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in 1952, has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness_and that can make him a famous man. When his experiment goes awry, and a research subject commits murder, the consequences will haunt him and his family forever.

An honest, insightful , and ruefully funny look at the fate of one American family vis-à-vis the rise of modern psychopharmacology, Pharmakon, or The Story of a Happy Family is nothing less than a contemporary epic. The novel follows William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in the early 1950s, who has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness to those who ingest it and fame and fortune to the man who can synthesize it. But when a brilliant and troubled research subject commits murder, the consequences will haunt Friedrich and his family for years to come.

From the author of Fierce People comes a blistering, haunting, aching novel about what you do when the unthinkable happens _ and when the memory of it refuses to be left behind "I was born because a man came to kill my father If he hadn´t showed up with a gun in his pocket and bad thoughts in his head, I wouldn´t exist, much less have a story to tell...