Martha Peake

Patrick McGrath

If you have a taste for the gothic - body snatching, human dissection, physical deformity and encroaching madness, with rape and incest added in - this is the book for you! However, everything is not all it seems and even the squeamish might persevere profitably.

Extract

It is a black art, the writing of history, is it not? - to resurrect the dead, and animate their bones, as historians do? I think historians must be melancholy creatures, rather like poets, perhaps, or doctors; but then, what does it matter what I think? This is not my story. This is the story of a father and his daughter, and of the strange and terrible events that tore them apart, so it is to those two unhappy souls that I would direct your gaze.

Parallels