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“Bad Juliet will hold you in its grip from its opening pages, combining the pacing and twists of a thriller with compelling characterizations and masterful prose. Giles Blunt captures the world of an early twentieth century sanitarium with the vividness and nuance of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, all the while confronting us with issues just as pressing today as they were a hundred years ago."
— Nino Ricci, Governor General's Award-winning author of Lives of the Saints and Sleep
Summary
Bad Juliet
Recently jilted by his fiancée, Paul Gascoyne takes a job as a tutor to the patients at the Trudeau Sanitarium in upstate New York. There, in the icebound beauty of the Adirondack Mountains, he finds himself drawn to Sarah Ballard, a beautiful but enigmatic young woman, traumatized by her past aboard the ill-fated Lusitania. To rouse her out of her gloom, Paul encourages her to write a memoir.
As Paul reads her words, it gradually becomes clear that Sarah’s memories are a tangle of truth and fiction that he can’t begin to unravel. And yet he cannot overcome his attraction to her. When a terrible relapse leaves her worried that she has little time left, Sarah begs Paul to be the one person in the world who will truly know her.