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Wreaking

Wreaking

Summary

'People who say there aren't any brilliant literary novels about contemporary England anymore have obviously never read this.' Irvine Welsh

A brilliantly imagined and unsettling novel from the award-winning author of Heliopolis and The Amnesia Clinic


Three solitary characters remember their shared past in a sprawling, derelict psychiatric hospital on the English coast: a turbulent summer in the aftermath of the hospital's closure that culminated in a shocking, life-altering accident. But the more each tries to comprehend the past, the more elusive it becomes. Wreaking is an intricate, labyrinthine novel about the opiate power of place, the fragility of sanity and the fickle nature of memory.

Reviews

  • This stays with you; an eccentric wonder about a disaffected, dying man, living in an abandoned insane asylum and various sinister, satellite characters; it's one of the most lyrical, gorgeously descriptive English novels of recent years - bafflingly ignored by prize judges
    Alan Warner, The Week

About the author

James Scudamore

James Scudamore is the author of the novels Wreaking, Heliopolis, and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

www.jamesscudamore.com
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