by Will Self
First published 2013
Psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital carrying the weight of professional failure. His therapeutic community experiment has collapsed, his marriage crumbles, and he wants nothing more than to keep his head down in the vast Victorian asylum. Then he meets Audrey Dearth. Born in 1890, this working-class woman from Fulham has spent decades locked in sleep, a victim of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that swept through Britain after World War One. Audrey once made munitions at Woolwich Arsenal, fought for workers' rights, championed women's causes. Now she lies motionless like the other post-encephalitic patients scattered throughout the hospital wards. Busner sees possibility where others see hopeless cases. He begins treatment to rouse these sleeping patients back to consciousness. But awakening minds that have slumbered since the Great War brings consequences no one anticipated. The boundary between past and present dissolves as Audrey and the others return to a world utterly changed from the one they left behind.
Genres: fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Friern Hospital, Fulham, Woolwich Arsenal
Period: Great War, Post-World War One
397 pages · Paperback · Bloomsbury
Content warnings: mental-illness