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Dark, unnerving and wickedly funny, Patrick McGrath's acclaimed short stories deal in the bizarre, the erotic and the unexpected. A failed writer meets an ageing gin-queen who claims he was once visited by an angel; a little girl finds a delirious, dying explorer from the Congo at the bottom of her back garden; a night-club is terrorized by a strange libidinous hand; and a young Victorian lady sails to India to find her fiance Cecil horribly transformed...

Master storyteller Patrick McGrath -- author of the critically acclaimed novel Asylum and a finalist for England's prestigious Whitbread Prize for fiction -- once again spins a hypnotic tale of psychological suspense and haunting beauty. Set among the teeming streets and desolate wharves of Hogarth's London, then shifting to the powder-keg colony of Massachusetts Bay, Martha Peake envelops the reader in a world on the brink of revolution, and introduces us to a flame-haired heroine who will live in the imagination long after the last page is turned. Settled with our narrator beside a crackling fire, we hear of the poet and smuggler Harry Peake -- how Harry lost his wife, Grace, in a tragic fire that left him horribly disfigured; how he made a living displaying his deformed spine in the alehouses of eighteenth-century London; and how his only solace was his devoted daughter, Martha, who inherited all of his fire but none of his passion for cheap gin. As the drink eats away at Harry's soul, it opens ancient wounds; when he commits one final act of unspeakable brutality, Martha, fearing for her life, must flee for the American colonies. Once safely on America's shores, Martha immerses herself in the passions of smoldering rebellion. But even in this land of new beginnings, she is unable to escape the past. Caught up in a web of betrayals, she redeems herself with one final, unforgettable act of courage. Superbly plotted and wholly absorbing, Martha Peake is an edge-of-your-seat shocker that is crafted with the psychological precision Patrick McGrath's fans have come to expect. Martha Peake is the poignant, often disturbing tale of a child fighting free of a father's twisted love, and of the colonists' struggle to free themselves from a smothering homeland. It is Patrick McGrath's finest novel yet.

Writing Madness is a new, massive collection of short fiction, novellas, and essays by Patrick McGrath. It features the complete contents of McGrath’s brilliant 1987 debut collection, Blood and Water and Other Tales, the three novellas of Ghost Town, six previously uncollected short stories, seven essays, and over 20 of McGrath’s insightful and engaging introductions and book reviews from over the years.
For thirty years Patrick McGrath’s novels have received high critical acclaim worldwide, and won prizes internationally. Writing Madness is the first large-scale collection of McGrath’s short fiction and nonfiction, including the stories in Blood and Water and Other Tales, and Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now. Also included in this unique volume are a number of McGrath’s essays, introductions and book reviews, and several uncollected stories. An account of his childhood in the shadow of the walls of Britain’s largest top-security mental hospital, “A Boy’s Broadmoor,” is reprinted here, as is his astonishing account of a bizarre true-life tragedy, “Death of a Silent Twin.” Gorgeously illustrated by Harry Brockway, Writing Madness has both an introductory essay by Joyce Carol Oates, and an endnote by Danel Olson. The writer who first coined the term The New Gothic, and has been called by one critic “possibly the best gothic novelist ever,” is here published in a beautiful volume from Centipede Press, sure to become a treasured item on every collector’s bookshelf.