Curative

This brilliant, compelling and unusual novel – part mystery, part philosophy and part social history – is set in the early years of the 19th century. The narrator is an inmate in Bedlam, the London mental asylum, where he is chained to a wall in unspeakably disgusting conditions. Yet he is witty, urbane and seemingly sane – he philosophises on freedom, on love and love lost, and on the fleeting na...