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Written by Patrick McGrath

• Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf
• On Sale: April 1, 2008
• Price: $24.95
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4166-4 (1-4000-4166-X)

about this book

Charlie Weir grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a supremely dysfunctional family: his father absenting himself, his mother battling depressive illness, his brother fighting him for whatever comfort remained. So no wonder he studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, eventually establishing a practice back in New York just as the first brutalized veterans of Vietnam started returning home with a world of hurt. Agnes, the sister of one of these men, soon became his wife, though her brother's death ended their marriage just as surely, stranding their daughter in between them and leaving Charlie to endure alone as his city fell further into a stupor of violence and mayhem. Then, years later, things begin to happen. His mother's death brings Agnes back into his life at last, and Walt, his brother, introduces him to a woman who first enlivens and then endangers everything Charlie hoped might restore his dwindling faith in himself, his calling, and his future.

This novel is like watching a ghastly accident in slow motion, with an expert voice-over made by one of its participants. Physician, heal thyself, is an expression that comes increasingly to mind as events spiral madly out of control and this story races, heedlessly and heart-strong, toward its shocking conclusion. It encapsulates the themes—family, passion, madness—that by now have become synonymous with Patrick McGrath.

“The inversion of roles, the blurring of the boundaries between the rational and the irrational, the violence, the twisted sexual passions, the slipperiness of memory: these are familiar themes in McGrath's fiction. Here they are recombined in powerful and imaginative ways. Trauma is a gripping psychological thriller. McGrath's prose is taut and lean; his way with characters is deft; and his explorations of the dark side of human nature are disturbing. And at the novel's centre, the descent of its narrator from a false sense of superiority into a pit of madness and despair is handled with great skill.”—Andrew Scull, The Times Literary Supplement

“Full of sensitive, well-observed touches [and] elegant when it needs to be…In Trauma, McGrath makes us see that our own minds are the most haunted of houses.”—Stephanie Zacharek, Los Angeles Times

“That hypnotic, reasonable and wistful voice of Dr. Charles Weir, psychiatrist, had me utterly in thrall…Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair…[It] is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Tortuous, often gripping. . . The novel is aptly titled, since trauma can be said to be the origin and the end of its insidiously uncoiling developments.” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review

“A haunting story of a man in the grip of a painful and beautifully articulated spiritual malaise.” —Publishers Weekly

“Trauma is Patrick McGrath at his dark-hearted best. Read one page–one sentence–and you’ll be hooked by this elegant psychological thriller set in the gritty, pre-gentrification Manhattan of the 1970s…Trauma reminds you of how satisfying it is to be unable to put a book down–and then, when it’s over, to be sorry and relieved to enter your own comparatively unhaunted life.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine