Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it. Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.

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.

Patrick McGrath is one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists but very little has been written about his work to date. This new book offers readings of McGrath's fiction informed by recent scholarship and evaluates his creative contribution to the continuation of the Gothic tradition into the twenty-first century.

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.

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.

Three haunting and brilliant tales from the hand of master storyteller Patrick McGrath 'Sharp and haunting ... McGrath's prose is clean, lucid and utterly transfixing' Sunday Times 'Like a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe, McGrath probes the insanity and violence lurking beneath the skin of daily life' Financial Times 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.

This book is the first collected volume to be entirely dedicated to the work of contemporary Anglo-American writer Patrick McGrath. It follows the international conference that was held in his presence at Perpignan University, France, in May 2011. It comprises nine chapters (as well as an introduction and an index) written by scholars specializing in Gothic and American literature, each dealing with specific aspects of McGrath’s work. The volume seeks to encompass the author’s whole literary production to date, spanning a 25-year writing career. It also features an exclusive afterword written by the author himself, who attended all the papers given during the conference with great attention and often intensely enthusiastic reactivity. The editor’s intention is twofold. The idea was first to provide a comprehensive survey of Patrick McGrath’s writing, returning to the aspects that are usually associated with the author’s work, such as his artful narrative control, his inclination for stories of “transgression and decay”, as well as his long-lasting reflexive relationship with the Gothic and the Grotesque. Yet the aim of this volume is also to open new directions for the study of McGrath’s texts, taking into account the noticeable evolution of the writer’s literary production, its growing Americanization and gradual distanciation with modes of excess. It seems that it is no longer possible to tag McGrath’s work as neo- or ‘postmodern’ Gothic. His books’ growing complexity and change of horizons call for fresh investigations. This book will be of interest to students of McGrath’s work, scholars of the Gothic and its contemporary manifestations, as well as to all academics specializing in contemporary American fiction.