Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach-a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital's owner, the peculiar Dr. Matthew Allen, his lonely adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are brought richly to life in this enchanting book. "Exceptional . earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic-the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach."-Times (London)
Download and start listening now!
“Adam Foulds is one of the best British writers to emerge in the past decade. His story of [the poet] John Clare's incarceration in a Victorian lunatic asylum is subtle, highly intelligent, and rich in its understanding of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between.”
—
Julian Barnes, author of Nothing to be Frightened Of and Flaubert’s Parrot