The Girl Who Couldn’t Read

A sinister Gothic tale in the tradition of The Woman in Black and The Fall of the House of Usher

New England, The 1890s

When a young doctor begins work at an isolated mental asylum, he is expected to fall in with the shocking regime for treating the patients. He is soon intrigued by one patient, a strange amnesiac girl who is fascinated by books but cannot read. He embarks upon a desperate experiment to save her but when his own dark past begins to catch up with him, he realises it is she who is his only hope of escape.

In this chilling literary thriller from a master storyteller, everyone has something to hide and no one is what they seem.

Reviews

‘Plentiful mysteries and good old-fashioned shocks punctuate this pacy and satisfyingly twisting coda’ DAILY MAIL

Praise for Florence and Giles:
‘A darkly glamorous tour de force’
DAILY MAIL

'Harding rings enough ingenious changes on James's study of perversity to produce his own full-blown Gothic horror tale' INDEPENDENT

‘An elegant literary exercise worked out with the strictness of a fugue: imagine Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw reworked by Edgar Allan Poe’ THE TIMES

About the author

John Harding was born near Ely. He is the author of the bestselling What We Did On Our Holiday, made into an ITV drama starring Shane Ritchie and Roger Lloyd Pack. He is a book reviewer for the Daily Mail and lives in London.