Margins
The Asylum book cover
The Asylum
2013
First Published
3.39
Average Rating
272
Number of Pages

A brilliant new Gothic thriller from the acclaimed author of The Ghost Writer and The Seance Confused and disoriented, Georgina Ferrars awakens in a small room in Tregannon House, a private asylum in a remote corner of England. She has no memory of the past few weeks. The doctor, Maynard Straker, tells her that she admitted herself under the name Lucy Ashton the day before, then suffered a seizure. When she insists he has mistaken her for someone else, Dr. Straker sends a telegram to her uncle, who replies that Georgina Ferrars is at home with him in “Your patient must be an imposter.” Suddenly her voluntary confinement becomes involuntary. Who is the woman in her uncle’s house? And what has become of her two most precious possessions, a dragonfly pin left to her by her mother and a writing case containing her journal, the only record of those missing weeks? Georgina’s perilous quest to free herself takes us from a cliffside cottage on the Isle of Wight to the secret passages of Tregannon House and into a web of hidden family ties on which her survival depends. Another delicious read from the author praised by Ruth Rendell as having “a gift for creating suspense, apparently effortlessly, as if it belongs in the nature of fiction.”

Avg Rating
3.39
Number of Ratings
5,062
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
37%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

John Harwood
John Harwood
Author · 4 books
John Harwood is the author of two previous novels of Victorian Gothic suspense. Aside from fiction, his published work includes biography, poetry, political journalism and literary history. His acclaimed first novel, The Ghost Writer, won the International Horror Guild's First Novel Award. He lives in Hobart, Australia.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved