Bedlam A Novel of Love and Madness

by Hollingshead, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780312427429
• ISBN10: 0312427425
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-30
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

An International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Nominee A TorontoGlobe and MailBest Book of the Year Conspiracies, plots, and paranoia are sweeping through London in the last days of the eighteenth century, and James Tilly Matthews has been caught under false pretenses and locked up in the city's vast, crumbling asylum. As his wife, Margaret, tries desperately to free him, political forces conspire to keep him locked up. Margaret's chief adversary is John Haslam, the asylum's chief apothecary, a man torn between his conscience and the lure of scientific discovery: as James becomes more famous--and more unhinged--he becomes a valuable specimen for the young doctor and a pawn in a grand political conspiracy. Based on real characters and events,Bedlamis a brilliant evocation of a city teetering between darkness and light, and a moving study of every kind of madness.

Author Biography

Greg Hollingshead is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and director of writing programs at the Banff Centre. He lives in Edmonton, Ontario.

Table of Contents

"Superbly disturbing . . . a profoundly moving examination of both mental and political lunacy."--The Boston Globe
 
"Bedlam has no end of gorgeous writing . . . elegant, heartfelt . . . filled with rewarding descriptions of a bygone era."--The New York Times Book Review
 
"A vivid picture of the grotesque patients and sadistic staff of the 'English Bastille' adds density to the gallows humor that peppers this brutal story."--Publishers Weekly

 

"Stylishly written, full of dazzling, epigrammatic insights . . . An intellectual novel, but also a moving story about fully fleshed human beings."--The Globe and Mail (Toronto)