The Quickening Maze

A seamless blend of historical fact and fiction...Foulds's writing has a poetic intensity and his descriptions of the autumnal woods around the asylum are as piercingly keen as his insight into the minds of the patients, the doctor and his family * Daily Mail *
Adam Foulds won the 2008 Costa Poetry Award, and he is a skilful poet. These talents are well displayed in his prose which, while lyrical, never grows fussy or highfalutin'. He draws a walk-on character with a few deft strokes -- Lionel Shriver * Telegraph *
A work of strikingly beautiful, unforced writing * Daily Express *
The chief pleasure of the book is its prose: exquisite yet measured, precise, attentive to the world * Sunday Telegraph *
Fould's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic - the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach * The Times *
Intensely pleasurable to read, studded as it is with electrically acute images and phrases * Observer *
Foulds wisely resists the temptation to turn Clare into an idiot savant, lunacy as the flip side of genius. The horror of a disintegrating mind is also subtly conveyed through fractured internal monologue * Financial Times *
Foulds was fast becoming the pin-up boy of contemporary poets...this beautifully described second novel suggests he's equally a master of prose -- Mariella Frostrup * Radio Times *
A profoundly imagined historical novel, with a gripping plot and some memorably beautiful scenes -- Craig Raine * Times Literary Supplement *
This imaginative, atmospheric period novel has style and a host of characters -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *