Umbrella

In 1971 Zachary Busner, a psychiatrist with unorthodox ideas, arrives at Friern, a large mental hospital on the edge of north London, and notices patients locked in strange, exact gestures repeated endlessly, unaware of anything around them. One of them, Audrey, was born in a West London slum in 1890, caught the sleeping sickness of 1918 and has lived on the wards ever since. Busner's attempts to wake her and the others with a powerful new drug alternate with Audrey's own flood of memories of Edwardian London: growing up, working as a clerk for an umbrella maker and in a munitions factory during the First World War, and the diverging lives of her two brothers. In 2010 the doctor, long retired, combs north London for answers about that summer.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

United Kingdom, 1890s–2010

First published

2012

Author's age

51 when first published

ISBN

9781408820148 (Bloomsbury, United Kingdom)

9780802120724 (Grove Press, United States)

9780802122025 (Grove Press, United States)

9781408831670 (Bloomsbury, United Kingdom)

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Wikidata