The Asylum - Hardcover

Harwood, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544003470 ISBN 13: 9780544003477

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

Synopsis

A brilliant new Gothic thriller from the acclaimed author of The Ghost Writer and The Seance

Confused and disoriented, Georgina Ferrars awakens in a small room in Tregannon House, a private asylum in a remote corner of England. She has no memory of the past few weeks. The doctor, Maynard Straker, tells her that she admitted herself under the name Lucy Ashton the day before, then suffered a seizure. When she insists he has mistaken her for someone else, Dr. Straker sends a telegram to her uncle, who replies that Georgina Ferrars is at home with him in London: “Your patient must be an imposter.”

Suddenly her voluntary confinement becomes involuntary. Who is the woman in her uncle’s house? And what has become of her two most precious possessions, a dragonfly pin left to her by her mother and a writing case containing her journal, the only record of those missing weeks? Georgina’s perilous quest to free herself takes us from a cliffside cottage on the Isle of Wight to the secret passages of Tregannon House and into a web of hidden family ties on which her survival depends.

Another delicious read from the author praised by Ruth Rendell as having “a gift for creating suspense, apparently effortlessly, as if it belongs in the nature of fiction.”

About this title

Review:

"A deliciously spooky pastiche of the high and low Gothic traditions and the tender heroines who live and die by them."
"New York Times Book Review
"
"Harwood, master of creeping Victorian horror, does it again. . . Twisted in every sense of the word and wonderfully atmospheric, this dark psychological tale shocks by degree until truth of a sort is revealed in a style similar to that of Joanne Harris' "Sleep, Pale Sister" and D.J. Taylor's "Kept.""
"Booklist"
"Harwood evokes Charles Palliser and Louis Bayard in his engrossing third stand-alone Victorian thriller. . . The crisp prose and twisty plot will encourage many to read this in one sitting."
"Publishers Weekly"

"With Harwood's beguiling pastiche "The Asylum," we're once again in a contemporary version of the Victorian Gothic mystery, with a lineage that stretches back to Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White" and beyond. Though it's not a comfortable place for the beleaguered heroine, readers are guaranteed a thoroughly diverting time in Harwood's not-to-be-trusted hands."

--"The Independent" (UK)"

"A deliciously spooky pastiche of the high and low Gothic traditions and the tender heroines who live and die by them."
--New York Times Book Review

"Harwood, master of creeping Victorian horror, does it again. . . Twisted in every sense of the word and wonderfully atmospheric, this dark psychological tale shocks by degree until truth of a sort is revealed in a style similar to that of Joanne Harris' Sleep, Pale Sister and D.J. Taylor's Kept."
--Booklist

"Harwood evokes Charles Palliser and Louis Bayard in his engrossing third stand-alone Victorian thriller. . . The crisp prose and twisty plot will encourage many to read this in one sitting."
--Publishers Weekly

"With Harwood's beguiling pastiche The Asylum, we're once again in a contemporary version of the Victorian Gothic mystery, with a lineage that stretches back to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and beyond. Though it's not a comfortable place for the beleaguered heroine, readers are guaranteed a thoroughly diverting time in Harwood's not-to-be-trusted hands."

--The Independent (UK)

Book Description:

I am Miss Georgina Ferrars, of Gresham’s Yard, London. I am. I swear that I am. And I shall prove it.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0544003470
• ISBN 13: 9780544003477
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257