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Start giftingAsylum
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreFrom 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.
Patrick McGrath is the author of Asylum, Port Mungo, Blood and Water and Other Stories, The Grotesque, Spider, and other books, and he was the co-editor, with Bradford Morrow, of The New Gothic.
Sir Ian McKellen is internationally renowned as the leading British actor of his generation. His Shakespeare performances on stage and screen are legendary. His versatility and preeminence in modern work as well as the classics have earned him over forty important acting awards. For over four decades, alongside his prestigious stage appearances worldwide, he has starred in scores of film, television, and radio productions.
Reviews
“A cleverly insidious, beautifully rendered thriller with just the right balance of splatter and innuendo.”
“A book as absorbing as it is intelligent…The story of this love affair unfolds like a dream into a nightmare—the characters move relentlessly toward their tragic end with desire ranging like a fire, gathering strength and destroying everything and everyone in its path.”
“From beginning to end Asylum is a hypnotic read, beautifully judged…ruthlessly manipulative.”
“[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.”
“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.”
“Sir Ian McKellen’s masterpiece of interpretive art so entrances…From the very first words, the beauty of his voice and delivery exerts a strange power, aided by the stunningly rich gothic text, reminiscent of the best Isak Dinesen tales.”
“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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