The Ballroom
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the internationally acclaimed author of Wake comes a haunting story of love, insanity, and revolution set at the brink of the Great War.
Yorkshire, England, 1911: After a moment of defiance at the factory where she has worked since she was a child, Ella Fay finds herself an unwilling patient at the Sharston Asylum. Ella knows she is not mad, but she might have to learn to play the game before she can make a true bid for freedom. John Mulligan is a chronic patient, frozen with grief since the death of his child, but when Ella runs towards him one morning in an attempt to escape the place where he has found refuge, everything changes. It is in the ornate ballroom at the centre of the asylum, where the male and female patients are allowed to gather every Friday evening to dance, that Ella and John begin a tentative, secret correspondence that will have shattering consequences, as love and the possibility of redemption are set against one ambitious doctor's eagerness to make his mark in the burgeoning field of eugenics, at all costs.
Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, at a time when England was at the point of revolt, The Ballroom is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patients in an asylum in 1911 find hope and redemption amid the bleakest circumstances in Hope's heartbreaking second novel (following Wake). After a violent confrontation at the mill where she works, Ella Fay finds herself confined in the Sharston Asylum, a bleak institution on the edge of the Yorkshire moors where female patients are confined indoors, subjected to hard labor, and bullied by belligerent nurses. The one bright spot in the patients' week is the weekly dance thrown in the asylum's ballroom. Presided over by attending physician (and amateur musician) Charles Fulller, the dances are the one opportunity male and female patients have to interact. It's here that Ella meets John Mulligan, an Irishman confined to the hospital for melancholia after the death of his wife and child. The two strike up a passionate affair, facilitated by the clandestine exchange of letters. Such a romance runs counter to Dr. Fuller's philosophies on the treatment and welfare of his charges, which, to the modern reader, range from confusing ("excessive reading is dangerous for the female mind") to outright backward (forced sterilization). And as Dr. Fuller's own grip on reality begins to loosen, Ella and John's chances for a happy life together or apart begin slipping away. Though the subject matter is occasionally difficult, a compelling cast of emotionally resonant characters, as well as a bittersweet climax, render Hope's second novel a powerful, memorable experience.
