Down Below

**A stunning work of memoir and a**n unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by** one of Surrealism's most compelling figures**

Leonora Carrington is perhaps the most enchanting of the women Surrealists. The daughter of Anglo Irish privilege, she broke free of her manor-house upbringing and fled, first to art school, and then to the Continent. Though she is best known as a painter of the gothic fantastic, with a cult following and one-woman shows at museums around the world, her writing is no less striking. *Down Below *describes the events of 1940, when, after her longtime lover, artist Max Ernst, was sent to a concentration camp, Carrington was -led across the border of Knowledge- and imprisoned in a sanatorium for the insane. This powerful testament, reminiscent of Carrington's great novel *The Hearing Trumpet*, ranks with the work of Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame in its raw evocation of madness.