The Quickening Maze Lib/E

Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach-a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital's owner, the peculiar Dr. Matthew Allen, his lonely adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are brought richly to life in this enchanting book. "Exceptional . earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic-the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."-Times (London)

About the Author :
Adam Foulds was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008. He is the author of several novels and the narrative poem The Broken Word, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 2008 Costa Poetry Award. He lives in London. Graeme Malcolm was an actor and winning audiobook narrator who earned twelve AudioFile Earphones Awards. He has performed on Broadway as Pharaoh in Aida and as Sir Edward Ramsay in The King and I. His television appearances include Law & Order, Follow the River, and Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (with Laurence Olivier). His film credits include A Further Gesture, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, and Reunion.

Review :

"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."

"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."

"Exceptional...Earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic--the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."

"Impressive...simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency."

"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."

"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."