Desideria

When Ange St Loup is brought unconscious to the madhouse of the Amaranth, she is outlandishly dressed, covered with scorches from the building she burned and bruises from jumping out one of its windows, and her mouth is sewn shut. And that is all she knows. Even as her memory returns to her, and she begins to piece together the puzzle of her life as an actress in the theatre Lady Minerva, every answer only raises further questions, and at the heart of them remain the ones she has no answers for. Answers that might explain what she was doing in an alley, by night, outside a burning building, with her face mutilated and her mind in tatters. Which version of the story is the truth? Is it Ange's own, despite the amnesia that only gives back her past in fragments? Is it the madhouse warders', which paints Ange as a murderer, or the prioress's, which paints her as insane? Is it the one that returns to Ange piecemeal, over time, growing only more sinister as it inches toward completion? Or is the truth something more complex, more dangerous, than anything that Ange can even grasp?

"Madness meets mystery in this lush, disjointed debut. Consigned to a sanitarium after leaping from a burning theater with a small red book in her arms, amnesiac Ange St. Loup battles the abusive warders as she tries to unravel memory fragments that sometimes move the story along and sometimes drag it to a halt. Somewhere in Ange's head, a company of thespians wallows in its group drama while she wallows in her miserable cell, kept company by a young inmate and her book, which may or may not be blank. Dense, rich and sometimes sparkling, the story moves jerkily and without warning between credibility and disbelief. Although Kornher-Stace's prose often dazzles, the story is littered with false reveals and deeply unreliable narrators, leading to a twist conclusion that feels like a cheap trick." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Kornher-Stace's exceptionally well-crafted debut plays out in a byzantine milieu of madhouses and melodramatic theater in an unnamed seventeenth-century European metropolis. When a woman is found lying outside a burning building, her memory mislaid, and her lips sewn shut, her only recourse for shelter is the church-run Amaranth asylum. Protected from abusive wardens by a resourceful fellow inmate, she slowly recaptures her identity as Ange St. Loup, a rising actress in one of the city's less-reputable theaters. As her life in the colorful Lady Minerva troupe comes back to her, however, Ange must grapple with the accusation that she is both insane and a murderess. Yet her greatest challenge awaits her in the person of Lady Minerva's unseen puppet master, a shadowy criminal mastermind known only as the Specialist, who subtly manipulates Ange's environment in a scheme bent on molding her into the city's greatest actress. In richly textured, atmospheric prose, Kornher-Stace delivers a spellbinding tale of deception, betrayal, and the darker possibilities of playacting." booklistonline.com