E-audiobook
Asylum
Record details
- ISBN: 9780792759645 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)
- ISBN: 0792759648 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)
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Physical Description:
electronic resource
remote - Publisher: [North Kingstown, R.I.] : BBC Audiobooks America, 2008.
Content descriptions
| General Note: | Downloadable audio file. Title from: Title details screen. Unabridged. "Sound Library." Duration: 8:39:12. |
| Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Sir Ian McKellen. |
| System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Media Console Requires OverDrive Media Console (file size: 124400 KB). Mode of access: World Wide Web. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Sex addicts -- Fiction Psychiatric hospitals -- Fiction Psychiatric hospital patients -- Fiction Psychiatrists' spouses -- Fiction Women -- Sexual behavior -- Fiction England -- Fiction |
| Genre: | DOWNLOADABLE AUDIOBOOK. Audiobooks. Psychological fiction. Downloadable audio books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- AudioFile Reviews : AudioFile Reviews 2005 February/March
Sir Ian McKellen's masterpiece of interpretive art so entrances that this reviewer could not stop listening until he had heard all eight hours and forty minutes. From the very first words, the beauty of his voice and delivery exerts a strange power, aided by the stunningly rich gothic text, reminiscent of the best Isak Dinesen tales. Sir Ian portrays a distinguished forensic psychiatrist seemingly telling of a curious case he witnessed. The beautiful wife of a colleague had run off with a patient, a spouse-slayer. His narrative seems to focus entirely on this woman's sexual obsession and its aftermath, but is he really as professionally detached as he sounds? With utterly brilliant understatement, Sir Ian prepares us from the beginning for the startling denouement, while simultaneously (and amazingly) keeping us totally in the dark about it. Further, while giving the impression that he's not doing anything special, he delivers all the shadowy beauty and psychological insight of a very fine novel. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1996 December
~ A contemporary master of highbrow gothic fiction, McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease, 1993, etc.) sticks to worldly psychopathology in his icy new novel. At the center of this study in ``morbid obsessional sexual compulsion'' is Stella Raphael, a British woman of extraordinary beauty married to a dull, unimaginative, cold forensic psychiatrist. Which makes life hard for the passionate Stella, who soon finds herself infatuated with one of the inmates at the maximum security institution where her husband works. Edgar Stark, a sculptor with a distinct ``animal vitality,'' suffers from ``morbid delusions.'' Insane jealousy inspired by these delusions led him to bludgeon his wife to death. A trusty at the hospital, Edgar works on the grounds of Stella's house, where their daily chats soon escalate into sweaty ruttings in the gazebo. After Edgar escapes, Stella follows him, but life underground with Edgar in London quickly becomes hard and shabby, and Stella misses her ten- year-old son. When Edgar's explosive jealousy emerges once again, Stella goes home. Her husband loses his job, and the family is forced into exile in Wales. In deep depression, Stella engages in meaningless sex with her landlord, drinks herself into a stupor, and watches, helpless, as her son drowns on a school outing. Found to be negligent, judged to be mad, she winds up in the very institution where her husband used to work, and where Stark is now an inmate again. But the real twist to this otherwise melodramatic tale is the narrator, himself a staff psychiatrist who treats both Stella and Edgar, and who also has designs on Stella--yet another man trying to possess this free spirit. The unreliability of the narrator, the intense psychological layerings of the narrative, and the fevered interpretations of events by McGrath's characters make for a truly complex (but never obscure) novel. McGrath, always a worthy descendant of Poe, here takes things a level higher--producing fiction in the tradition of Henry James. (First printing of 75,000; author tour) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1996 October
In McGrath's latest, which Random hopes will be his breakout book, the bored but gorgeous wife of a boring but successful psychiatrist launches a devastating affair with a sculptor who murdered his wife. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1996 December #3
McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease) has a mind that revels in the toxic side of things. In this tale of headlong descent into darkness and despair, the toxicity comes from obsessional love. Stella Raphael is the lovely but dissatisfied wife of Max, a resident psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane in the countryside near London. She becomes infatuated with Edgar Stark, a sculptor who murdered and mutilated his wife in a delusionary fit, and the two contrive a passionate affair when Edgar is assigned to work in the Raphaels' garden on the asylum grounds. Stealing Max's clothes, Edgar escapes to London and goes underground, where Stella eventually follows him. When he begins to manifest the same furious jealousies that led to his wife's murder, she flees home again, only to find she has ruined her husband's career. The Raphaels, with their young son, Charlie, are exiled to a remote hospital in rural Wales, where further disaster strikes as Stella drifts into her own desperate delusions. The story is told by another psychiatrist at the asylum, ostensibly through interviews with Stella. Although the doctor's own interpolations are sometimes a relief in the supercharged atmosphere, this seems an unnecessary device, and the intended frisson of his participation in the somber conclusion doesn't come off. In every other respect, however, the book is hypnotizing, with its own strange but darkly convincing pace and style; and the way in which nature and climate are woven into the fabric of the bizarre couple's strange love is masterly. 75,000 first printing; paperback rights to Vintage; rights sold in the U.K. and six European nations; author tour. (Feb.)
