£80.00
2009. Some minor damage to the top edge of the dustjacket
1 in stock
Description
Two young women, centuries apart, are both declared mad and find each other across time to fight a common enemy: their doctors.
In the present day, Emilie, a gifted young musician living with bipolar disorder, wakes on a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt. Locked in, she starts to find letters hidden between the pages of her own journal. They are written by Emily, a girl confined in a Victorian asylum where the inmates are subjected to ever more cruel experiments, and who in the end leads a rebellion to make the asylum a true sanctuary.
The book is drawn from the secret journal Autumn kept while she was a patient in a mental hospital. It mixes memoir, gothic historical fantasy and a sharp critique of how women and psychiatric patients have been treated, both then and now. It is the source of her concept album Fight Like a Girl and has a devoted cult following.
This is the coveted early hardcover, a large and lavish production weighing nearly five pounds. It has glossy full-colour pages throughout, filled with Autumn’s own illustrations, photographs, letters and ephemera, and is completely unlike the later text-only paperback.
