A Sunday Times fiction book of the year A Times Book of the Year A Daily Mail Historical Book of the Year 'An extraordinary, quite brilliant book' - C. J. Sansom 'Original and gripping' - The Times 'Powerful and unsettling' - Andrew Taylor 'Engrossing ... compelling' - The Sunday Times 'Powerful, imaginative' - Literary Review What kind of person keeps a man underground for seven years? And who would agree to be part of such an experiment? Herbert Powyss lives on a small estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and ...
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A Sunday Times fiction book of the year A Times Book of the Year A Daily Mail Historical Book of the Year 'An extraordinary, quite brilliant book' - C. J. Sansom 'Original and gripping' - The Times 'Powerful and unsettling' - Andrew Taylor 'Engrossing ... compelling' - The Sunday Times 'Powerful, imaginative' - Literary Review What kind of person keeps a man underground for seven years? And who would agree to be part of such an experiment? Herbert Powyss lives on a small estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable cultivation of exotic plants and trees. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science - something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: for seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the cellar of the manor house, fitted out with books, paintings and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay? Fifty pounds per annum, for life. Only one man is desperate enough to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate labourer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included. In this seductive tale of self-delusion and obsession, Alix Nathan has created an utterly transporting historical novel which is both elegant and unforgettably sinister. BBC History Magazine Best Historical Fiction of 2019
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Add this copy of The Warlow Experiment to cart. $3.28, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published 2020 by Knopf Publishing Group.
Add this copy of The Warlow Experiment to cart. $3.98, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Doubleday Books.
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Add this copy of The Warlow Experiment: a Novel to cart. $4.00, very good condition, Sold by HPB Inc. rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Doubleday.
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'...a reward of 50 pounds for life, to any man who would undertake to live for seven years underground...'
The Warlow Experiment is a fictional story based from a true article published in the 1793 which makes for a great premise. The idea of an author taking that true snippet of information and crafting a world and characters around it to fill in the blanks is really interesting and really drew me in to the idea of the story. Unfortunately for me, that was where my interest in the story ended I'm afraid. As mentioned by the author in the afterword this story started out as a short story and then got padded out to be a short novel - around 200 pages. I really feel that it should have stayed as a short story and it that would have been a lot more interesting I'm afraid. A lot of the chapters felt a like filler and it would have been easy to half the number of pages and it would not have made any difference to the plot.
From the blurb I was kind of expecting a 'Jekyll and Hyde' or 'Dorian Gray' style slip into madness from Warlow - something psychologically interesting and perhaps drawing the reader into the madness with him. Warlow however is a difficult character to sympathise with - his writing style is mainly written in short sentences and purposeful bad grammar which makes for hard reading. The character of Mr Powyss isn't much better either and I would go so far as to say he is truly unlikeable. In fact, there is no character in the story to sympathise or relate to which makes for a slow and tiresome read. There is a lot of the book which is includes base thinking towards women which I didn't particularly enjoy, there's an element of politics and class themes brought in as well but without much context so a lot of it was hard to follow. The psychological aspects of the initial experiment which I was most excited to read are not brought to the forefront enough which is a huge shame. In the end I felt like the core plot could have been so much more interesting but everything around it got in the way.
Overall I believe the Warlow Experiment would have fared a lot better as a short story - the filling put in as an attempt to make it a longer novel just does not work on this occasion. Thank you to NetGalley & Serpent's Tail/Profile Books for a copy of the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
