A compendium of book blurbs jumping into bed with a medical dictionary, a book about books meant for the medicine cabinet, a treatise on the power of the novel, a bibliotherapist’s vade mecum, a bibliophile’s treasure chest. Whichever way you look at it, The Novel Cure is all of these and more or as the authors say, “Our apothecary contains Balzacian balms and Tolstoyan tourniquets, the salves of Saramago and the purges of Perec and Proust. To create it we have trawled two thousand years of literature for the most brilliant minds and restorative reads, from Apuleius, second-century author of The Golden Ass, to the contemporary tonics of Ali Smith and Jonathan Franzen”.