Bedlam by Greg Hollingshead

• Edmonton Public Library, Canada
  

Publisher of Nominated Edition
HarperCollins Canada
ISBN 0002005573

Conspiracies 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 delusional, Matthews also appears to be incarcerated for unspecified political reasons, a pawn in a cruel game of ambition and power.

Extraordinarily evocative of time and place, Bedlam sweeps the reader into a world teetering between darkness and light, love and hate. Intellectually daring and profoundly moving, this is another masterwork from a Governor General's Award-winning author.

Greg Hollingshead is the author of The Healer, which won the 1998 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award, and The Roaring Girl, winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction. He has written two other short story collections and a novel, Spin Dry. He lives in Edmonton, Canada.