Lincoln Locke’s 15-year-old life is turned upside down when his parents’ marriage breaks down and he’s thrust into bachelor-pad living with his father and into an exclusive new school. Crestfield Academy offers Lincoln a new set of peers - the creme de la creme of gifted individuals, who also happen to be financially loaded - and a place on the swim relay team with a bunch of thugs in Speedos. Homunculus, the little voice inside his head, doesn’t make life any easier, nor does Lincoln’s growing awareness of a genetic anomaly that threatens to humiliate him at every turn.

On a search for answers to life’s big questions, he turns to the hallowed school library, where he spies a 19th-century memoir, My One Redeeming Affliction by Edwin Stroud, a one-time star of Melinkoff’s Astonishing Assembly of Freaks. As Lincoln slowly reads this peculiar, life-changing book, the past reaches into his present in fascinating and alarming ways. Ways that defy imagination …

Audacious, funny and wonderfully inventive, The Origin of Me is a song to friendship, to young love, to the joy of imagination and to celebrating differences.