FROM THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ASYLUM, TRAUMA AND THE WARDROBE MISTRESS'Wonderful, thrilling' JOHN BANVILLE'Has pleasure on every page' TIMESIt's 1975 and Francis McNulty, ageing poet, retired, is living in his childhood home in Cleaver Square with his daughter Gilly. Haunted by memories of the Spanish Civil War, in which he drove an ambulance, he sees awful visions of his old nemesis, General Franco, and is powerfully reminded of a terrible act of betrayal he committed in Spain. When Gilly announces her upcoming marriage, Francis is forced to confront his past, once and for all.'Impressive' GUARDIAN'A very moving portrayal of a complicated father-daughter relationship, neither of them fully able to break away' RACHEL JOYCE

Master storyteller Patrick McGrath--author of the critically acclaimed novel Asylum and a finalist for England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for fiction--once again spins a hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay, Martha Peake envelops the reader in a world on the brink of revolution, and introduces us to a flame-haired heroine who will live in the imagination long after the last page is turned.Settled with our narrator beside a crackling fire, we hear of the poet and smuggler Harry Peake--how Harry lost his wife, Grace, in a tragic fire that left him horribly disfigured; how he made a living displaying his deformed spine in the alehouses of eighteenth-century London; and how his only solace was his devoted daughter, Martha, who inherited all of his fire but none of his passion for cheap gin. As the drink...

Dark, unnerving and wickedly funny, Patrick McGrath's acclaimed short stories deal in the bizarre, the erotic and the unexpected. A failed writer meets an ageing gin-queen who claims he was once visited by an angel; a little girl finds a delirious, dying explorer from the Congo at the bottom of her back garden; a night-club is terrorized by a strange libidinous hand; and a young Victorian lady sails to India to find her fiance Cecil horribly transformed...

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ASYLUM, TRAUMA AND SPIDER'[W]onderfully sinister ... a delight ... you are in for a thrilling ride.' Spectator'A brilliant evocation of the theatrical world's seedy glamour, The Wardrobe Mistress is also a moving portrait of a woman struggling to make sense of her past and imagine a future for herself.' Sunday Times'Ghosts of the theatre and the spectre of fascism haunt cold and grimy London in this atmospheric tale from a master of the grotesque.' Guardian'[A] rich and highly spiced feast of a novel, even before it reaches its classically gothic McGrath climax.' Reader's Digest'[An] unnerving thriller.' StylistJANUARY 1947.London is in ruins, there's nothing to eat, and it's the coldest winter in living memory. To make matters worse, Charlie Grice, one of the great stage...

This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell. From Publishers Weekly Witty, weird and highly enjoyable, this gothic British tale is aptly titled. The set-up is macabre: a distinguished paleontologist is brain-damaged and slowly turning into a vegetable. He cannot speak, but narrates an interior monologue of all he sees and hears: a lot of sexual shenanigans and a particularly grisly murder, all centered around “Fledge,” the butler, who has ambitions. The stylistic joke is that all these horrors take place in a quaint, genteel English country setting, where the village is “Pock-on-the-Fling,” the pub, “The Hodge and Purlet” and the barrister, “Sir Fleckley Tome.” However deadly the deed, the language is always decorous and impeccably mannered. The result is strangely hilarious—as if a Stephen King story were being told in the manner of a latter-day Anthony Trollope. From Scientific American Magnificently grim … [McGrath] serves up this cold slice of modern Gothic with the deranged relish of a Poe but also the acrid irony of a Waugh.

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror. Amazon.com Review I cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a … thick, slow discharge I recognized as blood. A wry, mesmerizing tale of madness in a London suffused with the smells of jellied eels, leaking gas, outdoor lavatories and furry feet. Spider obsesses about wetness and fire and sexuality, about “this business of the thought patterns” and “the dead eyes” of his father and a woman named Hilda. Somewhere inside Spider’s internal web of illusions lurks the truth about his mother’s death. From Publishers Weekly In this “closely observed study of madness, memory and storytelling” the delusional Dennis Clegg, aka Spider, returns to his London neighborhood after 20 years in a mental hospital and insists that his father, not he, murdered his mother. “An admixture of Poe and the comic vulnerabilities of Beckett, this tale lingers long and disturbingly in the mind,” said PW. Adapted into film.

Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York.Yet he hasn't found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes that she has become more of a patient than a lover, events conspire to send him reeling toward the abyss. Addictive and enthralling, Trauma is Patrick McGrath's most riveting work to date.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A man is haunted by the memory of his mother with a rope round her neck. It is the American War of Independence, and having defied the British forces occupying New York she must pay for her revolutionary activities. But fifty years on her son harbours a festering guilt for his inadvertent part in her downfall. In thrusting nineteenth-century New York, a ruthless merchant's sensitive son is denied the love of his life through his father's prejudice against the immigrants flooding into the city—and madness and violence ensue. In the wake of 9/11, a Manhattan psychiatrist treats a favoured patient reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Center, but fails to detect the damage she herself has sustained.In this trio of stunning tales from a master storyteller, Patrick McGrath excavates the layers of New York's turbulent history.

The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance's fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely. Frightened, desperate and alone, Constance makes a disastrous decision, then looks on as her world rapidly falls apart. Her only consolation, as the city swelters in an interminable heat wave, is the friendship of Sidney's son Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself.The story of a marriage in crisis and a family haunted by trauma, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the moral inspiration that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light.