Bedlam

This extraordinary novel tells a dramatic and compelling story of three people caught up in the turmoil of the late eighteenth century, their lives inexorably intertwined in a time of war and revolution.

Conspiracies, plots and paranoia sweep across England in the aftermath of the French Revolution, landing tea broker James Tilly Matthews in Bethlem Hospital, a notorious, crumbling home for the insane. Although he is clearly delusional, Matthews appears to be incarcerated for unspecified political reasons. His beloved wife, Margaret, spends years trying to free her often lucid husband, only to be blocked at every turn by her chief adversary, John Haslam, Bethlem’s apothecary and chief administrator. The ambitious Haslam finds himself trapped between his conscience and a desire to further his career by studying his famous patient.

Bedlam creates an indelible portrait of London, a city teetering between darkness and light, struggling to make its way to a more just and humane future. In its darkest corners, where noblemen, pickpockets, royalists and republicans jostle for power, where corruption is all in a day’s work, Hollingshead finds humanity, truth, decency and forgiveness.

Enlivened with wit and intellectual daring, written in a beautiful prose that is resonant with time and place, Bedlam sweeps the reader into a strange yet somehow recognizable world that often echoes our own. From the enduring love of Matthews and his wife, to the despair of the Bethlem inmates, to the moral agonies of John Haslam, Hollingshead’s eye for rendering the human condition has never been finer. This is a flawless novel in which imagination bridges the chasm between love and hate, between loss and reconciliation.