The Asylum
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A young woman wakes in a strange bed.
A sickly light filters through a metal grille.
Doctor Maynard Straker steps into the room, and speaks.
‘Have no fear, Miss Ashton. I am entirely at your service.’
This, however, is not her name.
And she should not be here – in the Asylum.
She is Miss Georgina Ferrars, and she can prove it.
But when Dr Straker sends a telegram to her uncle in London, the reply is swift:
GEORGINA FERRARS HERE STOP
YOUR PATIENT MUST BE IMPOSTER STOP
Madness? Mistaken identity? Or are there more malevolent forces at work?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As he did in The Ghost Writer and The S ance, Australian author Harwood evokes Charles Palliser and Louis Bayard in his engrossing third stand-alone Victorian thriller. In the first sentence, Georgina Ferrars declares, "I woke, as it seemed, from a nightmare of being stretched on the rack, only to sink into another dream in which I was lying on a strange bed, afraid to open my eyes for fear of what I might see." Alas, Georgina finds herself in a Cornwall asylum, whose sinister director, Dr. Maynard Straker, tells her that she arrived the previous day, November 1, 1882, and identified herself as 21-year-old Lucy Ashton. With no memory of the previous six weeks, Georgina is hard-pressed to refute Straker. Only gradually do the events that led to her confinement become clear. The crisp prose and twisty plot will encourage many to read this in one sitting, though the ending won't satisfy everyone.
