One day Colin Grant'e(tm)s teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed as epileptic. A Smell of Burning tells the remarkable story of epilepsy. How certain people, at a certain moment in their life, start to suffer seizures, the severity of which may vary from minor petit mal absences to the grand mal seizures in which the body suffers violent convulsions. There are more than sixty million epileptics on the planet, most being diagnosed before the age of twenty-five. For many years epilepsy was associated with mental illness or even possession by devils.

Epileptics were forbidden to marry or have children and became victims of Nazi eugenics programmes. To this day many epileptics still live in fear of exposure. Grant'e(tm)s book traces the history of the condition and the pioneering doctors who through years of experiments finally began to gain an understanding of how the brain works and how a sudden excessive discharge in the grey matter causes an epileptic seizure. He tells the stories of famous epileptics like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vincent Van Gogh, and through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.