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A Cruel Madness
  • Published: 3 January 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099437192
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

A Cruel Madness

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'As compelling as a thriller - Mr Thubron has hit that most disturbing target, the target of imaginative truth' Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph

When a part-time worker in a mental hospital meets his old girlfriend inside he is not sure at first is she is a patient. Their reunion is haunted and haunting, and from the memory of their past affair there unfolds a labyrinth which darkens from romantic obsession to feelings deeper and more disturbing. Colin Thubron creates a world of passion, delusion, and reality mingling with unreality, pervaded by an all-consuming sense of longing and of loss.
  • Published: 3 January 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099437192
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

About the author

Colin Thubron

COLIN THUBRON is a celebrated travel writer, winner of many prizes and awards. His classic travel books include: Among the Russians (1983), Behind the Wall (1987), In Siberia (1999), Shadow of the Silk Road (2006) and The Amur River (2021). He is also the author of eight acclaimed works of fiction, including A Cruel Madness (1984), winner of the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, To the Last City, long-listed for the Booker Prize (2002), and Night of Fire (2017). Passage is his ninth novel, shaped by a journey to Egypt.
portrait photo of Colin Thubron

Also by Colin Thubron

Night of Fire
Shadow of the Silk Road
The Amur River
To a Mountain in Tibet
Journey Into Cyprus
Passage
Mirror To Damascus
See all

Praise for A Cruel Madness

A nightmare vision of emotional instability and insanity... If Van Gogh or Munch had been novelists, or Strindberg a painter, they would have created similar mental landscapes... A work of fiction whose hold on the intellect is as strong as its grip on the senses: that sounds, looks, tastes and smells like a minor masterpiece

Time Out

Brilliant... A Cruel Madness brings to mind other novels set in the microcosmic world of a hospital, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

New York Times Book Review

With terrifying vividness, Mr Thubron creates a phantasmagoric world

Spectator

A quietly extraordinary tour de force

Times Literary Supplement

Colin Thubron conjures up, within a tight narrative, a whole persuasive world - not just the physical setting of the hospital, but the tortuous and paradoxical internal world of the warped mind

Penelope Lively