Norman was once a child prodigy, a parent's favorite and a brilliant lawyer... at forty-one years old, he was a drug addict who almost never left his bedroom, completely in the grip of paranoia and hallucinations. A mental hospital seems to be the only way out for the father and sister. Having decided to take this painful step, they unwittingly release into freedom thoughts and feelings that all family members had hidden for many decades - from each other and from themselves. The novel “The Chosen One” brought Bernice Rubens the Booker Prize in 1970, but half a century later it has not lost its sharpness. Rubens ruthlessly and with deep compassion explores the relationships of people closely bound by traditions, aspirations, feelings of guilt and duty, love and hatred. This tangle of contradictory characters and destinies, skillfully unwound by the author, is a family tightly knit together by mutual alienation and mutual dependence.