One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

It’s a satirical novel about a group of people in constant fear of the "combine" (outside world) who are unaware of their own strengths, who don’t have courage enough to question rules and tradition; about people tagged as "different" with respect to the so called proper societal behavior traits. Amongst a bunch of such guys who refer to themselves as rabbits, comes a lion - who dares to be himself, who does not accept things as they are, who teaches them to live - not merely exist. And changes the world around them: by opposing the tyranny of the nurse who treats all these patients of the mental institution as her puppets...but alas…he himself gets lost in it.

The language is simple, narrated from the point of view of a (supposedly) deaf and mute patient of the mental asylum where the novel is set and he is in fact the one which ‘flies over the cuckoo’s nest’. All the characters are very well defined and the reader cannot help liking the protagonist, the one who makes the flying, or rather, ‘fleeing’ possible, in spite of the many shortcomings he has.

The book has long been established as a classic and made into a major Hollywood motion picture which bagged five Academy Awards in the year 1975.