Asylum

Set in 1980s Ottawa and at a monastery in the Tuscan countryside, Asylum follows the lives of a small group of people whose stories become inextricably linked. Among them are a man whose obsessive jealousy is corroding his marriage, a professor with a roving eye that will lead him towards a personal crisis, and a woman whose family secret is hers alone to bear until her bitter and cantankerous grandmother dies. This is a novel of fortunes lost and found, of politics and vain ambition, of love and memory and the impossibility of finding home.