The Illness Lesson

Stunningly good—a brainy page-turner that’s gorgeous and frightening in equal measure. The Illness Lesson dazzled me.

Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

The Illness Lesson is a brilliant, suspenseful, beautifully-executed psychological thriller. With power, subtlety, and keen intelligence, Clare Beams has somehow crafted a tale that feels like both classical ghost story and like a modern (and very timely) scream of female outrage. I stayed up all night to finish reading it, and I can still feel its impact thrumming through my mind and body. A masterpiece.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Clare Beams’ writing has a hypnotic quality. Her images are rendered with inventive, piercing clarity (apples knocking together like knees!), yet she is also doing something quite special with rhythm and pacing, creating a subtle soundscape that completely envelops you in the narrative. Reading The Illness Lesson I experienced the exquisite sense of vertigo that is only ever sparked by a writer who’s so in control of her story . . . That bond of trust did not disappoint: The Illness Lesson shines with generosity and rage, and I was both chilled to the bone by it, and felt comforted and held.

Livia Franchini, author of 'Shelf Life'

The Illness Lesson truly shook me. In prose so sharp it cuts through the decades and arrives at the present day, Clare Beams takes a shocking moment out of true history, and brings it to life. You want to know how horrifying things happened while decent people looked on and did nothing? Read this novel. I believed every nuance of these characters’ thoughts, the conflicts waging war inside their own minds, their devastation, and their courage. I was immensely moved by this story, and the people who populate its pages.

Mary Beth Keane, author of 'Ask Again, Yes'

Beams takes risk after risk in this, her first novel, and they all seem to pay off. Her ventriloquizing of the late 19th century, her delicate-as-lace sentences, and the friction between the unsettling thinking of the period and its 21st century resonances make for an electrifying read. A satisfyingly strange novel from the one-of-a-kind Beams

Kirkus

Narrated from a painfully intimate perspective, The Illness Lesson explores the consequences of an outrageous medical treatment inflicted upon adolescent girls in 1870’s New England to cure "hysteria". In Clare Beams’ luminous and suspenseful prose, the unspeakable is spoken, falteringly at first, then with triumphant strength. Its timeliness will be evident to readers for whom the suppression of female sexuality / identity is an ongoing and urgent issue.

Joyce Carol Oates

Beams excels in her depiction of Caroline, an intriguingly complex character, and in her depiction of the school, which allows the reader a clear view of changing gender roles in the period, with parallels to today’s sexual abuse scandals. This powerful and resonant feminist story will move readers

Publishers Weekly

This suspenseful and vividly evocative tale expertly explores women’s oppression as well as their sexuality through the eyes of a heroine who is sometimes maddening, at other times sympathetic, and always wholly compelling and beautifully rendered

Booklist

The gripping novel meditates on how an all-male establishment can deny women’s pain, and how the consequences can shape a society.

Vanity Fair

A Sunday Times Books to Read in 2020: A classic ghost story for fans of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Deborah Levy, Jeffrey Eugenides

Sunday Times Style

A top pick for the coming year . . . this haunting novel blends historical fiction with a timely comment on women’s bodies and minds, and those who think they can control them. Unmissable.

Stylist

Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections.

New York Times

‘Subtle, clever, suspenseful . . . builds to a shocking climax’

Diane Setterfield

Alcott meets Shirley Jackson, with a splash of Margaret Atwood. It’s dark, quirky and even titillating . . . on the edge between realism and ghost story

The Washington Post

'Beams' highly readable but unsettling debut novel has a 19th-century elegance and Gothic tone attuned perfectly to its themes of shadows from the past, omens, men's control over women's bodies and the hint of a malign force just beyond our ken'

The Herald