Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: asylum

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  The Secret Scripture

  by Sebastian Barry

  A gorgeous new novel from the author of the Man Booker finalist A Long Long Way As a young woman, Roseanne McNulty was one of the most beautiful and beguiling girls in County Sligo, Ireland. Now, as her hundredth year draws near, she is a patient at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, and she decides to record the events of her life. As Roseanne revisits her past, hiding the manuscript beneath the... (more)
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  The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

  by Emilie Autumn

  Presenting Emilie Autumn's long awaited autobiographical, reality-bending thriller, "The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls." This beautifully bound hardcover volume measures 8" x 11.5" and clocks in at a massive 274 fully illustrated pages. Positively packed with hand-written memoirs, photos, and paintings, this profoundly empowering epic not only deserves a place on your tea table, it is also one of the most... (more)
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  Asylum

  by Patrick McGrath

  From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has... (more)
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  Bedlam

  by Catharine Arnold

  'Bedlam!' The very name conjures up graphic images of naked patients chained among filthy straw, or parading untended wards deluded that they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. We owe this image of madness to William Hogarth, who, in plate eight of his 1735 Rake's Progress series, depicts the anti-hero in Bedlam, the latest addition to a freak show providing entertainment for Londoners between trips to the Tower Zoo,... (more)
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  The Quickening Maze

  by Adam Foulds

  A visionary novel by “one of the most talented writers of his generation” (The Times Literary Supplement)—shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; “Impressive...simultaneously poised and flowing in its urgency.”— The Guardian (London); “The world <Foulds> evokes...is conjured up with remarkable intensity and economy of means. It is impossible to guess where Foulds will travel next in his fiction, but it is safe... (more)
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  Saving Max

  by Antoinette Van Heugten

  Max Parkman—autistic and whip-smart, emotionally fragile and aggressive—is perfect in his mother's eyes. Until he's accused of murder. Attorney Danielle Parkman knows her teenage son Max's behavior has been getting worse—using drugs and lashing out. But she can't accept the diagnosis she receives at a top-notch adolescent psychiatric facility that her son is deeply disturbed. Dangerous. Until she finds Max,... (more)
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  The Bell Jar

  by Sylvia Plath

  Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented and successful, but slowly going under — maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational — as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most... (more)
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  The Madman's Tale

  by John Katzenbach

  It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually... (more)
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  The Observations

  by Jane Harris

  An extraordinary historical novel about a peculiar friendship between the mistress of a Scottish estate and her irresistibly appealing housemaid.Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley-a wide-eyed and feisty young Irish girl-takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella-the "missus." Bessy lacks the necessary... (more)
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  The Blackstone Chronicles: The Serial Thriller Complete in One Volume (Blackstone Chronicles)

  by John Saul

  Now, for the first time, the New York Times bestselling serial thriller is complete in one terrifying volume. John Saul, the master of supernatural suspense, John Saul, brings to chilling life the small New England town of Blackstone--and the secrets and sins that lay buried there. . . . From atop Blackstone's highest hill, the old Asylum casts its shadow over the village. Built in the 1890s to house the insane,... (more)
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  The Emancipator's Wife

  by Barbara Hambly

  As a girl growing up in Kentucky, she lived a sheltered, privileged life filled with picnics and plantation balls. Vivacious, impulsive, and intoxicated by politics, she is a Todd of Lexington, an aristocratic family whose ancestors defeated the British. But no one knows her secret fears and anxieties. Although she is courted by the most eligible suitors in the land, including future senator Stephen Douglas, it... (more)
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  Ten Days in a Madhouse

  by Nellie Bly

  In 1887 Nellie Bly, one of the first female newspaper writers, and a young reporter who would soon go on to make a career for herself as an investigative journalist and “stunt” reporter, had herself committed to the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum in New York. Her purpose was to discover what life was like for those who had been deemed insane. She was surprised to discover the depth of mistreatement of the... (more)
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  Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto

  by Maile Chapman

  In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands an austere convalescent hospital called Suvanto. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege--the "up-patients." They are tended to by head nurse Sunny Taylor, an American who has fled an ill-starred life only to retreat behind... (more)
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  Mad in America

  Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

  by Robert Whitaker

  A riveting social and medical history of madness in America, from the seventeenth century to today. In "Mad in America," medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries, and quite possibly worse than asylum patients did in the early nineteenth century. With a muckraker's passion, Whitaker... (more)
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  Breaking the Silence

  by Diane Chamberlain

  Laura Brandon had promised her dying father she would visit Sarah Tolley, but her own agony is drowning out the old woman's ramblings. Her husband killed himself, and the only witness--her daughter, Emma--now refuses to speak. Desperate, Laura turns to a man she met once nine years ago: Emma's real father. Together they search frantically for the key to Emma's silence, only to find it in an old woman's fading... (more)
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  An Inconvenient Wife

  by Megan Chance

  Young Mrs. Lucy Carleton is the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in 1880s New York City. William Carleton is Lucys un-pedigreed, nouveau riche husband. Problems arise when Lucy becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the prudish manners and paternalistic dependencies that define the wives of New York society. Lucy longs to break away and give free reign to her more bohemian soul, but her... (more)
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  Daddy-Long-Legs: Book 2

  Dear Enemy

  by Jean Webster

  Sallie McBride, the new director of the John Grier Home for Orphans, keeps her friends posted on the latest occurrences in that institution.
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  One Foot Wrong

  by Sofie Laguna

  “The stars shine brightest out of the deepest dark . . .” A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive, religious parents. Hester Wakefield has never spoken to another child, nor seen the outside world. Her one possession is an illustrated children’s Bible, and its imagery forms the sole basis for her capacity to make poetic, real-life connections. Her companions at home are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom,... (more)
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  Girl, Interrupted

  by Susanna Kaysen, Anna Hamilton Phelan, James Mangold, Lisa Loomer

  In the late 1960s, the author spent nearly two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility. Her memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perceptions, while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. "Searing ... captures an exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight." — Boston Globe.
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  Nadja

  by André Breton

  Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life.The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an... (more)