Asylum : The Highgate Novels (Book One)

"There are no monsters, we are told, but what if there are, what if the monsters are all around us, what if we are the monsters?"

Charlotte Eyre had never felt comfortable in her own middle class skin in the late 19th century of Queen Victoria's reign, living in a village near Manchester. She had always felt like a freak, a misfit, an outsider in an encroaching world of bricks and mortar, a world she looked beyond and saw within a darker primeval supernatural place.

Charlotte frequently sees the dead and has visions of a person's character, be it dark or light, so when she finds herself in the presence of a strange uncanny being, Dr Jonathan Seward, she is confused, is he alive, dead, or something in-between?

She leaves her northern village behind and travels south to Highgate Asylum to be Dr Seward's assistant, but soon discovers that Highgate is no ordinary asylum. Highgate is a place of many secrets, a place for the broken and disowned, the unwanted unloved people. The outcasts of society, for patients with strange unworldly talents.

It is also a sanctuary for those dark uncanny souls with monstrous secrets to hide. And when Charlotte finally discovers the terrifying supernatural secrets about those closest to her, will she also discover the nightmarish unbelievable truth about her own hidden past?

Book One in The Highgate Series, inspired by The world of Penny Dreadful and other Gothic Horrors.

By the author of The Immortal Saga and Home amongst others.