March House

The arrival of a mysterious new psychiatrist at March House, the psychiatric clinic where Ruth works, heralds the collapse of her entire world. Dr Laver is flamboyant, vulgar, possibly even unethical - but he starts Ruth on an uneasy journey through the past, in which she glimpses her parents for the first time as separate people, in which her wholesome country life seems filled with madness and pain, and in which the happy childhood she thought she had crumbles away to reveal something quite different. In the characters who compose Ruth's world - her cousin Hilda, her mother, he father's woman friend Eleanor, the mad old lady Miss Maud - the author displays all her characteristic wit, and her deep understanding of human motivation. Mary Hocking charts the transformation in the relationship between father and daughter, between Ruth and her colleagues, with great subtlety, drawing us further and further into this landscape of the mind till the final moving conclusion.