This extraordinary love story, based on historical characters and
written with Boyle’s customary brilliance and wit, follows the lives of
two scarred creatures living in a magical age. It is the turn of the
century. Stanley McCormick, the twenty-nine-year-old heir to the great
Reaper fortune, meets and marries Katherine Dexter, a woman of ‘power,
beauty, wealth and prestige’. Two years later, Stanley falls victim to a
tormenting sexual mania and schizophrenia, and is imprisoned in the
massive forbidding mansion known as Riven Rock. He spends the next two
decades under the control of a succession of psychiatrists, all of whom
forbid any contact with women. Yet Katherine Dexter, now famous as a
champion for women’s suffrage and Planned Parenthood, remains strong in
her belief that someday her husband will return to her whole.
Based on a true story of love, madness and sexuality this is a tragic
book with enormous depth and scope. Set in America at the turn of the
century, it is full of fascinating historical detail.
