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, f...

***SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION***From the bestselling author of Asylum, Trauma and Spider'Ghosts of the theatre and the spectre of fascism haunt cold and grimy London in this atmospheric tale from a master of the grotesque.' GuardianJANUARY 1947.London is in ruins, there’s nothing to eat, and it’s the coldest winter in living memory.

The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy child...

This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.

Three haunting and brilliant tales from the hand of master storyteller Patrick McGrath'Sharp and haunting ... McGrath's prose is clean, lucid and utterly transfixing' Sunday Times'Like a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe, McGrath probes the insanity and violence lurking beneath the skin of daily life' Financial TimesA man is haunted by the memory of his mother with a rope round her neck. It is the American...

Master storyteller Patrick McGrath--author of the critically acclaimed novel Asylum and a finalist for England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for fiction--once again spins a hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay, Martha Peake envelops the reader in a world on the brink of revolution, and introduces us to ...

FROM THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ASYLUM, TRAUMA AND THE WARDROBE MISTRESS'Wonderful, thrilling' JOHN BANVILLE'Has pleasure on every page' TIMESIt's 1975 and Francis McNulty, ageing poet, retired, is living in his childhood home in Cleaver Square with his daughter Gilly. Haunted by memories of the Spanish Civil War, in which he drove an ambulance, he sees awful visions o...

Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York.Yet he hasn't found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes...

The acclaimed Costa-shortlisted author of Trauma and Asylum brings us a masterful novel of psychological suspense and marriage in 1960s America'A tour de force ... Unforgettable' New York Times**'An e**legant psychological thriller' The TimesThe aloof and enigmatic Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan when s...

A story of self-obsession narrated by the point of view of a psychiatrist, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950s, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls 'the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession.' His experience is extensive, and he is never surprised. Until, that is, he comes reluctantly to accept that the wife of one of his colleagues has embarked on such ...

In a seedy river town on the Gulf of Honduras, Jack Rathbone believed he had found a place that would give him and his lover, the accomplished artist Vera Savage, the solitude they would need to create a body of work that would shake the art world to its core. But in a place where time lies thicker than the mangrove swamps that surround it, Jack and Vera discover an emotional frontier more fearsome, untamed, and dangerous than any wilderness.Told through the voice of Jack’s adoring sister,...

From 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....