The Quickening Maze

Adam Foulds discusses his latest book, The Quickening Maze, based on real events that occured in and around the High Beach Asylum.

Based on real events that occurred in and around the High Beach Asylum, Epping Forest in 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the life of the great nature poet John Clare. Historically accurate, but creatively imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates - the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Alfred Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself – are brought vividly to life in this compelling tale. In this talk Adam Foulds discusses his new book, The Quickening Maze, and explores John Clare’s hope of home, redemption and escape.

Adam Foulds’s first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and his book-length narrative poem The Broken Word, the following year. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008 and won the COSTA prize for poetry in 2009.

‘A remarkable and passionate book. The worlds it creates, the forest and the asylum, and the characters that inhabit them are drawn with a wonderfully strange poetic intensity. It is a wholly original vision, impossible to forget.’ Patrick McGrath

This event is organised in partnership with Newham Bookshop.

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