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BooksBedlam
PUBLISHER'S
STATEMENT Conspiracies, plots and paranoia sweep across England in the aftermath of the French Revolution, landing tea broker James Tilly Matthews in Bethlem Hospital, a notorious, crumbling home for the insane. Although he is clearly delusional, Matthews appears to be incarcerated for unspecified political reasons. His beloved wife, Margaret, spends years trying to free her often lucid husband, only to be blocked at every turn by her chief adversary, John Haslam, Bethlem's apothecary and chief administrator. The ambitious Haslam finds himself trapped between his conscience and a desire to further his career by studying his famous patient. Bedlam creates an indelible portrait of London, a city teetering between darkness and light, struggling to make its way to a more just and humane future. In its darkest corners, where noblemen, pickpockets, royalists and republicans jostle for power, where corruption is all in a day's work, Hollingshead finds humanity, truth, decency and forgiveness. Enlivened with wit and intellectual daring, written in a beautiful prose that is resonant with time and place, Bedlam sweeps the reader into a strange yet somehow recognizable world that often echoes our own. From the enduring love of Matthews and his wife, to the despair of the Bethlem inmates, to the moral agonies of John Haslam, Hollingshead's eye for rendering the human condition has never been finer. This is a flawless novel in which imagination bridges the chasm between love and hate, between loss and reconciliation. PRAISE FOR BEDLAM "An imaginative tour de force. Bedlam has the slippery lucidity of its subject: knowing madness in a world gone mad." "Bedlam is stylishly written, full of dazzling epigrammatic insights into authority, tyranny, jealousy, love and other knotty aspects of human nature." "An exquisitely rendered tour of melancholy and raving madness tempered with profound love and hope. . . . Not since Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea . . . has the sordid depravity and mercurial beauty of the unhinged mind been illuminated. . . . Hollingshead's style is strangely compelling. It's harsh, intimate and wise and filled with poetic flashes and sublime humour." "Hollingshead has long used empathy, wit and lucid prose to nail contemporary manners. Now he has applied those same qualities to a very different epoch, and, as a good historical novel should, Bedlam shows how some things may not have changed as much as we think." "[Hollingshead] has brilliantly brought to life the atmosphere, ideas and language of late-18 th- and early 19 th-century England. . . . With a pair of rich characters (and Matthews' wife is no small achievement, either), a vivid setting and a nuanced, thought-provoking set of ideas, Bedlam ought to attract considerable attention this year in Canada and internationally." "Hollingshead's use of three narrators to tell the same story gives Bedlam a multifaceted depth and complexity few contemporary Canadian novels achieve." "[Hollingshead] handles his first-rate material with verve and sensitivity." "A rich, complex and often disturbing novel about an extraordinary man." "Delivers shocking jolts of truth about the immutable dilemmas of the human condition." "Meticulously crafted." "An important and compassionate contribution to the literature of madness." AUTHOR'S
STATEMENT The British social historian Roy Porter has told this story most thoroughly in his 1988 edition of Haslam's book concerning Matthews, Illustrations of Madness (1810). While exercising some fictional licence, I am doing my best to be faithful to the characters, their voices, their experiences, and the times. PRAISE FOR GREG HOLLINGSHEAD "Hollingshead
understands some of the most intricate manoeuvres of the human
heart." " .
. . a writer who deserves to be considered in the front ranks
of contemporary fiction writers." "(What
is) immediately striking about Hollingshead is the gravity
of his voice, which is authorial and strong
even
in its comic mode." "An
imagination that moves equally freely in the realms of the
bizarre and the everyday." "There's
an electricity in the writing . . . it's
honest and organic in its discovery of characters, human tendencies,
the natural – that all speaks of his gifts as a storyteller." "[W]it, intelligence, provocation, a refined focus on the rhythms and nuances of language, meticulous research and big ideas worthy of attention." "Hollingshead narrates the story of paradoxically ordinary characters practising affective individualism in a surreal setting." "It is . . . very much worth entering into this world, not only because of the novel's wonderful climax, but because of what Bedlam achieves in general by experimenting with the grandeur and the intimacy of eighteenth-century prose as well as with the themes of reality and illusion." "[S]uperbly disturbing . . a decidedly intellectual yet profoundly moving examination of both mental and political lunacy . . ." "[G]orgeous . . . heartfelt writing and smart research . . . carefully unearthing and framing a long-lost time."
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