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The Warlow Experiment

‘A Reward of £50 a year for life is offered to any man who will undertake to live for 7 years underground without seeing a human face.’ Herbert Powyss’s advert, taken out in 1793, attracts just one applicant – farmer John Warlow – but the consequences of the experiment reach further than either of them anticipated.
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RRP £12.99

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Product information:
  • Publisher: Serpent's Tail
  • Year: 2019
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288pp
  • Illustrated: No
  • Dimensions: 215x134mm
  • ISBN: 9781788161695
  • Condition: New
  • Weight: 0.5kg
Product code:
516222
Category tags:
Product information
Full publisher description
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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