Description
A Sunday Times fiction book of the year A Times Book of the Year A Daily Mail Historical Book of the Year ‘An extraordinary quite brilliant book’ – C. J. Sansom ‘Original and gripping’ – The Times ‘Powerful and unsettling’ – Andrew Taylor ‘Engrossing … compelling’ – The Sunday Times ‘Powerful imaginative’ – Literary Review What kind of person keeps a man underground for seven years? And who would agree to be part of such an experiment? Herbert Powyss lives on a small estate in the Welsh Marches with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman’s fashionable cultivation of exotic plants and trees. 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 cellar of the manor house fitted out with 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; 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 enough to apply for the job: John Warlow a semi-literate labourer 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. In this seductive tale of self-delusion and obsession Alix Nathan has created an utterly transporting historical novel which is both elegant and unforgettably sinister. BBC History Magazine Best Historical Fiction of 2019