The Bedlam Stacks

Natasha Pulley

eBook - 2017

An Indie Next PickNow in paperback, Natasha Pulley's "witty, entrancing novel . . . burnishes her reputation as a gifted storyteller" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).In 1859, ex–East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall with an injury that almost cost him his leg. When the India Office recruits him for an expedition to fetch quinine—essential for the treatment of malaria—from deep within Peru, he knows it's a terrible idea; nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who's made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is eager to escape the strange events plaguing his family's crumbling estate, so he sets off, against his better judgment, for the edge of t...he Amazon.There he meets Raphael, a priest around whom the villagers spin unsettling stories of impossible disappearances, cursed woods, and living stone. Merrick must separate truth from fairy tale, and... more