Patricia Duncker's nameless narrator is a young graduate student writing his dissertation on Paul Michel, a beautiful gay French novelist whose brilliant and scandalous career ended in madness a decade before. The student begins a journey to find him, searching from Cambridge University to a remote French insane asylum and, in the process, changing from Michel's reader to his lover, liberator, and captive, while discovering the secret of his madness. Spell binding, sinister, intellectually provocative, and sensually overpowering, Hallucinating Foucault is a breathtaking literary debut.