Bedlam

Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

A Toronto Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

Conspiracies, plots, and paranoia are sweeping through London in the last days of the eighteenth century, and James Tilly Matthews has been unjustly locked up in the city's vast, crumbling asylum. As the story progresses--following James's attempts at escape, his wife's efforts to free him, and the hospital administrator's campaign to keep him locked up--Greg Hollingshead gradually reveals the circumstances that led to James's incarceration. As the filth and darkness bear down on him, his own sanity dwindles but his fame beyond the hospital grows. Before long, he has become the asylum's most prized possession, and a pawn in a grand political conspiracy.

Based on real people and events, Bedlam is a brilliant evocation of a city teetering between darkness and light, and a moving study of every kind of madness.