A Cruel Madness
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:7th Oct '04
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
'As compelling as a thriller - Mr Thubron has hit that most disturbing target, the target of imaginative truth' Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph
When a part-time worker in a mental hospital meets his old girlfriend inside he is not sure at first is she is a patient. Their reunion is haunted and haunting, and from the memory of their past affair there unfolds a labyrinth which darkens from romantic obsession to feelings deeper and more disturbing.When a part-time worker in a mental hospital meets his old girlfriend inside he is not sure at first is she is a patient. Their reunion is haunted and haunting, and from the memory of their past affair there unfolds a labyrinth which darkens from romantic obsession to feelings deeper and more disturbing. Colin Thubron creates a world of passion, delusion, and reality mingling with unreality, pervaded by an all-consuming sense of longing and of loss.
A nightmare vision of emotional instability and insanity... If Van Gogh or Munch had been novelists, or Strindberg a painter, they would have created similar mental landscapes... A work of fiction whose hold on the intellect is as strong as its grip on the senses: that sounds, looks, tastes and smells like a minor masterpiece * Time Out *
Brilliant... A Cruel Madness brings to mind other novels set in the microcosmic world of a hospital, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest * New York Times Book Review *
With terrifying vividness, Mr Thubron creates a phantasmagoric world * Spectator *
A quietly extraordinary tour de force * Times Literary Supplement *
Colin Thubron conjures up, within a tight narrative, a whole persuasive world - not just the physical setting of the hospital, but the tortuous and paradoxical internal world of the warped mind -- Penelope Lively
ISBN: 9780099437192
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 12mm
Weight: 128g
176 pages