Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now

Description

A man is haunted by the memory of his mother standing under a gibbet with a rope round her neck. It is the American War of Independence, and having defied the British forces occupying New York she must pay for her revolutionary activities. But fifty years on her son harbours a festering guilt for his inadvertent part in her downfall. Then, in a nineteenth-century New York of thrusting commercial enterprise, a ruthless merchant's sensitive son is denied the love of his life through his father's prejudice against the immigrants then flooding into the city - and madness and violence ensue. Finally, a Manhattan psychiatrist tries to treat a favoured patient reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Centre. But she fails to detect the damage she herself has sustained, and suffers the consequences of her blindness.

Patrick McGrath is the author of a short story collection, Blood and Water and Other Tales, and six novels: The Grotesque, Spider, Dr Haggard's Disease, Asylum, Martha Peake and most recently Port Mungo, which was published by Bloomsbury. He lives in London and New York. Spider was made into a film in 2002 by acclaimed director David Cronenberg.

'Fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter any more' Tobias Wolff on PORT MUNGO 'His prose, sinuous, savoury and sly, is a delight' Graham Swift