Asylum » (Reprint)

Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where for many years his father was a medical superintendent.  He is the author of Blood and Water and Other Tales, The Grotesque, Spider, and Dr. Haggard's Disease, and he was the co-editor, with Bradford Morrow, of The New Gothic.  He lives in New York City and London and is married to the actress Maria Aitken.

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.

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.

New Yorker

Superb.... Asylum is McGrath's most somber and most realistic book, and also his best.