Bedlam: A Novel of Love and Madness

An International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Nominee. A Toronto Globe and Mail Best 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 citys vast crumbling asylum. As his wife Margaret tries desperately to free him political forces conspire to keep him locked up. Margarets chief adversary is John Haslam the asylums 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 Bedlam is a brilliant evocation of a city teetering between darkness and light and a moving study of every kind of madness.