"Tristram Hart is a bright young medical student in 18th century England who embraces the new Enlightenment principles of reason and science. He also happens to suffer from psychosis and a predilection for sexual sadism. What ensues is a deranged, prurient, grisly, often bizarrely touching story told by one of the least reliable narrators I’ve met.
Part of the fascination for me is that rural English fears and superstitions from a darker age are interwoven throughout the plot in stark rebellion to the encroaching Enlightenment. This book reminds me somewhat of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell— evoking a time when magic reigned as a hostile and capricious force and fairies might kidnap your children."
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication Date 2013-03-26
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780143123828
The explosive and controversial debut novel by a major new voice in fiction
Meet Tristan Hart, a brilliant young man of means. The year is 1751, and at the age of twenty he leaves home to study medicine at the great hospital of St. Thomas in London. It will be a momentous year for the intellectually ambitious Mr. Hart, who, in addition to being a student of Locke and Descartes and a promising young physician, is also, alas, psychotic. He is obsessed with the nature of pain and medically preventing it, but—equally strong and much harder to control—is his obsession with causing it. Desperate to understand his deviant desires before they are his undoing, he uses the new tools of the age—reason and science and skepticism—to plumb the depths of his own dark mind.
Profoundly imaginative, unexpectedly funny, and with a strange but moving love story at its heart, The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones is an oddly beautiful and daring novel about the relationship between the mind and body, sex, madness, pain, and the existence of God.
