Writing and mental illness make excellent bedfellows, for better or worse. The Rapids – creative and courageous – is an extraordinary personal memoir peppered with film and literary criticism, as well as family history. With reflections on artists such as Carrie Fisher, Kanye West, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Paul Thomas Anderson and Spalding Gray, Twyford-Moore also looks at the condition in our digital world, where someone’s manic episode can unfold live in real time, watched by millions. His own story, told unflinchingly, is shocking and sometimes blackly comic. It gives the book an edge that is not always comfortable but full of insight and empathy. Smart, lively and well-researched, The Rapids manages to be both a wild ride and introspective at once, exploring a condition that touches thousands of people, directly or indirectly.


Debut book of Sam Twyford-Moore, a young, talented, up and coming writer.
A brutally honest, personal and blackly comic look at the lifelong and incurable – though manageable – condition of bipolar.
Looks at how mania is represented in popular culture and literature, as a reflection of a larger view from society.
Lively and extraordinarily diverse – he can move across mental and physical states, time and place while holding his reader entranced through quality of his writing.
Sam is well known as former director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival and a widely published author.
Mania as a common condition associated with bipolarity or manic depression so many people will relate, either directly or as a way to understand the experiences of family and friends.