AUDIOBOOK
About
From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959, Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting-a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues-a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
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Reviews
"The book is hypnotizing, with its own strange but darkly convincing pace and style; and the way in which nature and climate are woven into the fabric of the bizarre couple's strange love is masterly."
Publishers Weekly
"[Asylum] features a subtly deceptive narrator whose confident, musical voice seduces you-a voice that mirrors, in its meter, emotions ranging from lyrically obsessed, to meticulously fond, to cautious and stiff with horror. And the imagery is unforgettable."
Amazon.com, editorial review
"McGrath wields a cleverly modernized form of Victorianism, precise and stately, to render scenes of unsettling and suspenseful eroticism in settings as diverse as the bursting garden where the doomed lovers meet; the bleak, rain-blasted coast of Wales; and the pitiless hallways of the asylum. All is push and pull here, as mad strategies are followed to their dire conclusions."
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