 | | | | | | Asylum | | Item Specifics - Fiction Books | | | Author: | Patrick McGrath | | Format: | Hardcover | | | Publisher: | Random House Inc | | Category: | Literature, Modern | | | ISBN-10: | 0679452281 | | Sub-Category: | -- | | | ISBN-13: | 9780679452287 | | Condition: | Used | | | Publication Year: | 1997 | | | | | | Special Attributes: | 1st Edition | | | | | | |
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| Portions of this page Copyright 1995 - 2008 Muze Inc.  All rights reserved.
 Additional information |
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This is an Advanced Readers Copy. The cover art is different than what the publisher used for the general public.
The ISBN came up with Hardcover, but this is a Softcover Advanced Reader's Edition in Very Good Condition. Aside from some light wear on cover edges, the bottom front outside corner has a curl, as do the first three pages beneath this curl. All else looks great--glossy cover, nice and unmarked pages.
Ships next day, delivery confirmation included, and will combine ship.
Thanks!
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| | | | Additional Information about Asylum
Portions of this page Copyright 1995 - 2008 Muze Inc. All rights reserved.
| Synopsis | Stella is the wife of a psychiatrist at a rural insane asylum. Bored with her life, she becomes enamored of one of the patients, a man named Edgar, who murdered his wife in a shocking manner. A contemporary gothic novel, ASYLUM is concerned with the conflicts of art and psychiatry, men and women, madness and sanity, and features a particularly artful unreliable narrator.
| | Size | | Length: | 254 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in. | | Width: | 6.8 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 18.4 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it.Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stellas garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love.Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.
| | Industry reviews | "McGrath has written a quite marvellous novel; unsensational and yet slowly shocking, rich not in its surface activity, since its prose is plain and unruffled, but in the tormented depths of its spirit. The complexity and richness of the novel spring, I think, from the oldest and least dispensable of the novelist's skills, the analysis of psychology; a skill which, we are temporarily persuaded, leaves the abilities of his hapless characters far behind."
Spectator - Philip Hensher (08/17/1996)
"It is McGrath's most sombre and most realistic book, and also his best."
New Yorker - John Lanchester (01/27/1997)
"We don't usually associate Gothic novels with elegance and discretion, but these are the defining features of Patrick McGrath's work."
New York Times Book Review - Michael Wood (02/23/1997)
"The unreliability of the narrator, the intense psychological layerings of the narrative, and the fevered interpretations of events by McGrath's characters make for a truly complex (but never obscure) novel. McGrath, always a worthy descendant of Poe, here takes things a level higher--producing fiction in the tradition of Henry James."
Neff
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