The arrival of Randle McMurphy disrupts the ward’s rigid routine and exposes the tension between the powerful and the powerless.

Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel is set inside an Oregon psychiatric hospital, narrated by Chief Bromden, and thought it's most often remembered through its film adaptation, the novel itself is stranger. Threaded with hallucination, mechanical imagery and shifting perception, Kesey blends dark humour with unease, allowing the institutional setting to feel both intimate and mythic.

A cornerstone of postwar American fiction that still reads with bite.