Wellcome Prize finalists announced for books on medical themes

Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel “The Signature of All Things” is a finalist for the Wellcome Book Prize for the best book on a medical topic, along with five nonfiction books, including Oliver Sacks’ “Hallucinations.”

The $50,000 prize recognizes books with “a central theme that engages with some aspect of medicine, health or illness.” The other finalists are: “Wounded: The Long Journey Home from the Great War,” by Emily Mayhew, which follows soldier patients from the battlefield through recovery; “Creation: The Origin of Life,” by Adam Rutherford, which takes up topics of synthetic biology and biological history; “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity,” by Andrew Solomon; and “Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England,” which examines the use and abuse of mental-illness diagnoses in the 19th century.

Gilbert, the author of the bestselling memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” takes on themes of family relationships and botany in her Wellcome Prize-shortlisted novel as her characters travel from London, to South America, Philadelphia, Polynesia and Amsterdam. In a review in The Times, Carolyn Kellogg said Gilbert “pairs elaborate scenes of life in the 1800s with surprisingly modern twists --like the cache of dirty books her heroine, Alma Whittaker, finds most interesting.”

Sacks’ “Hallucinations” is an “investigation into hallucinations -- auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory -- their many guises, their psychological sources and their personal and cultural resonances,” the Wellcome citation said. Sacks relates his own experimentation with drugs, and David Ulin, in a review in The Times, said “Hallucinations” “seeks to work against our preconceptions, whether they have to do with clinical distance or the larger question of what hallucination means.”

“The Wellcome Book Prize highlights the importance of literature in connecting medicine, life and art,” poet Andrew Motion, who chaired the judging panel, said in the Telegraph. “We have produced a shortlist that covers an exciting range of subjects and genres -- six excellent books that in their different ways all tell us new and often surprising things about the human condition.”

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hector.tobar@latimes.com