Bedlam: A Novel of Love and Madness Book

An International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Nominee

A Toronto Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year

Conspiracies, plots, and paranoia are sweeping through London in the last days of the eighteenth century, and James Tilly Matthews has been caught under false pretenses and locked up in the city's vast, crumbling asylum. As his wife, Margaret, tries desperately to free him, political forces conspire to keep him locked up. Margaret's chief adversary is John Haslam, the asylum's chief apothecary, a man torn between his conscience and the lure of scientific discovery: as James becomes more famous—and more unhinged—he becomes a valuable specimen for the young doctor and a pawn in a grand political conspiracy. Based on real characters and events, Bedlam is a brilliant evocation of a city teetering between darkness and light, and a moving study of every kind of madness.

The New York Times - Andrew Sean Greer

Lesser writers of historical fiction often stoop to melodrama. Hollingshead, happily, does not, though he does resemble the headstrong theatrical producer who buys the costumes first and then is forced to find actors to fit them. But while his storytelling may not be the reason to read Bedlam, his love of language—so carefully unearthing and framing a long-lost time—certainly is.