The Asylum

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

Confused and disoriented, Georgina Ferrars awakens in asmall 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 herthat she admitted herself under the name Lucy Ashton the day before and then suffereda seizure. When she insists he has mistaken her for someone else, Dr. Strakersends a telegram to her uncle, who replies that Georgina Ferrars is at homewith him in London: “Your patient must be an imposter.”

Suddenly her voluntary confinement becomes involuntary. Whois the woman in her uncle’s house? And what has become of her two most preciouspossessions, a dragonfly pin left to her by her mother and a journal thatcontains the only record of those missing weeks? Georgina’s perilous quest tofree herself takes her from a cliffside cottage on the Isle of Wight to the secretpassages of Tregannon House and into a web of hidden family ties on which hersurvival depends.

Here is another delicious read from the author praisedby Ruth Rendell as having “a gift for creating suspense, apparentlyeffortlessly, as if it belongs in the nature of fiction.”