Fill the World

Even the greyest world contains within it more colour than a mortal heart can bear.

1973. In a plain room in St Augustine's Home for the Aged and Infirm, Chicago, a life is drawing to a close. Isolated and eccentric, Henry Darger has spent his days shuffling between his apartment, daily Mass and the hospital where he worked as a janitor, occasionally scouring bins and kerbsides for newspaper clippings and treasures to add to his collection.

The world has not noticed Henry Darger. But he has noticed the world - seen the seismic changes industrialisation and urbanisation have brought to twentieth-century America; seen two world wars, hypocrisy, violence and loss of innocence. And finding the outside world to be little more than a vista of cruelty and concrete, he has dedicated his life to creating his own: a vast universe in which the Vivian Girls fight against the forces of evil in the Realms of the Unreal ...

Unknown during his lifetime, Darger's work is now considered to be an iconic example of American outsider art, its apocalyptic visions as disturbing as they are compelling, Fill the World takes us deep into the mind of its creator, in a novel that is shocking, mysterious and ablaze with otherworldly colour.