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The Asylum cover art

The Asylum

By: John Harwood
Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
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Publisher's Summary

A brilliant new Gothic thriller from the acclaimed author of The Ghost Writer and The Séance.

Confused and disoriented, Georgina Ferrars awakens in a small room in Tregannon House, a private asylum in a remote corner of England. She has no memory of the past few weeks. The doctor Maynard Straker tells her that she admitted herself under the name Lucy Ashton the day before and then suffered a seizure. When she insists he has mistaken her for someone else, Dr. Straker sends a telegram to her uncle, who replies that Georgina Ferrars is at home with him in London: "Your patient must be an imposter."

Suddenly her voluntary confinement becomes involuntary. Who is the woman in her uncle’s house? And what has become of her two most precious possessions: a dragonfly pin left to her by her mother and a journal that contains the only record of those missing weeks? Georgina’s perilous quest to free herself takes her from a cliffside cottage on the Isle of Wight to the secret passages of Tregannon House and into a web of hidden family ties on which her survival depends.

Here is another delicious read from the author praised by Ruth Rendell as having "a gift for creating suspense, apparently effortlessly, as if it belongs in the nature of fiction."

©2013 John Harwood (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic Reviews

"Creepy doings - certificates of insanity, switched identities, morbid personalities - in and around an asylum in 19th-century England… Harwood certainly makes the atmosphere work here." ( Kirkus Reviews)
"Engrossing… The crisp prose and twisty plot will encourage many to read this in one sitting." ( Publishers Weekly)
"Harwood, master of creeping Victorian horror, does it again in his latest tale of pervasive evil and madness.… Twisted in every sense of the word and wonderfully atmospheric, this dark psychological tale shocks by degree until truth of a sort is revealed, in a style similar to that of Joanne Harris’ Sleep, Pale Sister and D. J. Taylor’s Kept." ( Booklist)

What listeners say about The Asylum

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Brilliant and moving

I read this book many years ago, and I enjoyed it so much as an audiobook as well. The narrator has brought the characters to vibrant life, and the story is just brilliant. I’m so pleased I’ve got this in my library! John Harwood is a magnificent writer.

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  • Kim
  • 14-12-2021

Average

For me this book was average - there were some sections that were a little confusing (maybe because I drifted off with some of the storyline), but it was easy enough to pick up again. The ending was OK but it could have been written with a little more tension and excitement. The narrator probably kept me listening through to the end.

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