From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily
beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her
psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally
insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant
and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic
rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that
ensues--a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around
her....

Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York.Yet he hasn't found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes that she has become more of a patient than a lover, events conspire to send him reeling toward the abyss. Addictive and enthralling, Trauma is Patrick McGrath's most riveting work to date....