Debut Novel Combines Strong Writing With Page-Turning Suspense
On the surface, Marcus Stevens’s new novel, The Curve of the World (Algonquin), is an adventure novel. A New York businessman is stranded in the Congolese rainforest, desperately running from a rogue militia, all the while trying to survive a cruel and unknown environment. But dig deeper, and Stevens’s first novel is about the human mind, and how our own perceptions can create or remake the world in which we live.
In Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital (PublicAffairs), a Book Sense 76 May/June title, Alex Beam tells the story of McLean Hospital, refuge of the rich, famous, and deeply troubled for almost two centuries. McLean is a mental hospital-cum-luxurious estate set in acres of rolling New England parkland just outside Boston. The picturesque asylum also looms large in the American imagination.