Listen free for 30 days

Preview

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Asylum

Written by: John Harwood
Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
Try for $0.00

$14.95 per month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $22.03

Buy Now for $22.03

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.

Publisher's Summary

A brilliant new Gothic thriller from the acclaimed author of The Ghost Writer and The Séance.

Confused and disoriented, Georgina Ferrars awakens in a small room in Tregannon House, a private asylum in a remote corner of England. She has no memory of the past few weeks. The doctor Maynard Straker tells her that she admitted herself under the name Lucy Ashton the day before and then suffered a seizure. When she insists he has mistaken her for someone else, Dr. Straker sends a telegram to her uncle, who replies that Georgina Ferrars is at home with him in London: "Your patient must be an imposter."

Suddenly her voluntary confinement becomes involuntary. Who is the woman in her uncle’s house? And what has become of her two most precious possessions: a dragonfly pin left to her by her mother and a journal that contains the only record of those missing weeks? Georgina’s perilous quest to free herself takes her from a cliffside cottage on the Isle of Wight to the secret passages of Tregannon House and into a web of hidden family ties on which her survival depends.

Here is another delicious read from the author praised by Ruth Rendell as having "a gift for creating suspense, apparently effortlessly, as if it belongs in the nature of fiction."

©2013 John Harwood (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What the critics say

"Creepy doings - certificates of insanity, switched identities, morbid personalities - in and around an asylum in 19th-century England… Harwood certainly makes the atmosphere work here." ( Kirkus Reviews)
"Engrossing… The crisp prose and twisty plot will encourage many to read this in one sitting." ( Publishers Weekly)
"Harwood, master of creeping Victorian horror, does it again in his latest tale of pervasive evil and madness.… Twisted in every sense of the word and wonderfully atmospheric, this dark psychological tale shocks by degree until truth of a sort is revealed, in a style similar to that of Joanne Harris’ Sleep, Pale Sister and D. J. Taylor’s Kept." ( Booklist)

What listeners say about The Asylum

Average Customer Ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    2
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    6
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

great read.

love it. listened to it while I was working night shift at a psychiatric hospital 😀

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Serviceable Gothic Tale

John Harwood puts together a very atmospheric 19th-century story about a period-accurate woman thrust into a fascinating twisty-turny "secretive/assumed identity" scenario that keeps readers guessing.
Harwood's writing is capable, his plotting is imaginative, and his somber imagery conveys a mood - but the characters are somewhat cookie-cutter (like something out of a Brontë novel) and the book largely failed to catch my attention. My mind wandered annoyingly frequently.. and that ending🙄

Fortuitously for audiobook aficionados: Reader Rosalyn Landor narrates the book almost flawlessly. She very occasionally betrays some "I am reading a book" disinterest, but her crisp diction, spot-on accents, praiseworthy timbre & cadence, and hyperrealistic voice-acting render this Blackstone Audio Inc. production a legitimate joy to consume.

In toto, 'The Asylum' merits 7.5 stars out of 10. Paying a Credit for this sinuous period drama would be worthy of debate if they asked for one.. but downloading it as a 'Plus' option is a no brainer. Do so immediately.

[NOTE: The climax of this story is laughably ludicrous. So much so that it nearly ruins the novel]

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Welcome Break

Wonderful narration by Rosalyn Landor.
The story is simple, intriguing enough and a pleasant break from the moral ambiguity of so many stories out there today.
I will give this author another go.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Very good story

This was a really good book. I’m glad this was a free title as I normally don’t spend credits on books this small. It was a very good story line having you guess why she’s in the asylum throughout the book. The only thing I didn’t like was for a good hour and a half the book is just reading letters back and forth between two people which got kind of boring. I finished the book in about 4 days as it had me wanting more.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Not for me

Struggled to get engaged with the story. Kept getting distracted and had to keep going backwards. Will not be finishing.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!