*The Quickening Maze

Within the first few pages of The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, I sighed with pleasure because I could tell that I was in the hands of a writer who knew what he was doing. I could feel the competence, the control of language, structure and story from the start and it never flagged.

This is a novel about the people associated with a private insane asylum in 1840's England: Dr. Matthew Allen, the director of the asylum, Hannah, his teenage daughter, the famous nature poet John Clare, who is a...