About this item
Named one of the best books of 2019 by the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (London) , and the BBC An utterly transporting and original historical novel about an eighteenth-century experiment in personal isolation that yields unexpected--and deeply, shatteringly human--results."The best kind of historical fiction. Alix Nathan is an original, with a virtuoso touch." --Hilary Mantel Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentlemans fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact whatsoever; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay: fifty pounds per annum, for life. Only one man is desperate to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate laborer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included.
About the Author
Alix Nathan was born in London and educated there and at the University of York where she read English and Music. She now lives in Shropshire on the border with Wales. In 2014 she published a collection of short stories, His Last Fire and in 2015 a novel, The Flight of Sarah Battle (both with Parthian Press) . 2019 sees the publication of The Warlow Experiment with Serpent's Tail in the UK and with Doubleday in the US.
