Dimensions
142 x 220 x 31mm
"'There's a dance,' the girl says, 'every Friday evening at seven o'clock. The women and the men. They have a band, and a stage - it's through there.' She points with a finger at some locked double doors. 'That's the ballroom. But only if you're good.' 'Have you been there?' says Ella. She watches as the girl nods, tucking her fair hair behind her ears. The way she looks, all pink and prickly, Ella wonders if she has a sweetheart. Imagine having a sweetheart in a place like this. Imagine these mad women dancing with mad men. Just the thought of it makes her sick. Ella Fay is a new patient in the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum. She knows she is not mad, but she might have to learn to play the game before she can escape. John Mulligan is a chronic patient, frozen with grief since the death of his wife, but when a young girl runs towards him one morning, his life is about to change. And Charles Fuller is an ambitious young doctor eager to make his mark in the new field of Eugenics. Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, THE BALLROOM is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and san
