The Quickening Maze - Tapa blanda

"Adam Foulds is one of the best British writers to emerge in the past decade. His story of [the poet] John Clare's incarceration in a Victorian lunatic asylum is subtle, highly intelligent, and rich in its understanding of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between."
-Julian Barnes, author of Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Flaubert's Parrot

"What a haunting, fascinating book this is. Foulds leads us deep into a mysterious maze of history, where the demarcations of sanity are blurred, reality competes with dreams, and the truth is what any character imagines it to be."
-Joanna Scott, author of Follow Me and Arrogance

"A remarkable and passionate book. The worlds it creates, the forest and the asylum, and the characters that inhabit them are drawn with a wonderfully strange poetic intensity. It is a wholly original vision, impossible to forget."
-Patrick McGrath, author of Trauma and Asylum

"Tender and scrupulous...what I love most about THE QUICKENING MAZE is its quietness, the silence that makes you lean in until you hear its lovely song."
-Nadeem Aslam, author of The Wasted Vigil

"Exceptional...like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic-the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."
-The Times (London)

"[Foulds is] one of the most interesting and talented writers of his generation."
-The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Impressive...simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency."
-The Guardian (London)

After depressed alcoholic poet John Clare ends up in a mental institution on the outskirts of London in 1837, another young writer, Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entwined in the schemes of the hospital's owner, his lonely adolescent daughter and a host of mysterious local characters. The first U.S. publication of a novel shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Original.