Bedlam

Sobre el libro Bedlam de Jennifer Higgie publicado por Verso en 2026:

Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Rich­ard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England´s most notorious sanitariums, London´s Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam. A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexan­drian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd´s fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd´s imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam. At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd´s voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and consid­ered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.