“Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative…This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses.”—The Seattle Times An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own. As in her noteworthy deput, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters brilliantly evokes the sights and smells of a moody and beguiling nineteenth-century London, and proves herself yet again a storyteller, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, of "startling power."

サラ・ウォーターズが描く本作は、ヴィクトリア朝の冷徹な監獄を舞台にした、孤独な魂の救済と裏切りの迷宮です。日記形式の精緻な叙述が、抑圧された女性たちの情熱と霊界の怪しげな影を交錯させ、読者を心理的迷路へと引き込みます。単なるゴシック小説を超え、階級や性差という「社会の檻」を告発する鋭い視座が、文学としての格調を高めています。 映像版では監獄の閉塞感が鮮烈に描かれますが、活字ならではの醍醐味は、信頼できない語り手による「認識の揺らぎ」にあります。映像のリアリズムと、小説の持つ叙述トリックの深みが共鳴し合うことで、物語の背後に潜む残酷なまでの美しさが完成するのです。ページを捲るたびに真実が書き換えられていく、その戦慄の読書体験をぜひ味わってください。