Can love save those who believe they are beyond redemption? That is the question at the heart of this eagerly anticipated new novel by the acclaimed author of In the Country of the Young and The Mermaids Singing, an utterly remarkable tale of salvation at the last possible moment in the last place imaginable. Alba Elliot is tired of being crazy. In and out of Abenaki Mental Hospital more than a dozen times in ten years, fed up with diagnoses that come without cures and a life organized by a days-of-the-week pill case, the twenty-five-year-old children's book writer is waiting for a miracle. Oscar Jameson, a thirty-year-old drug addict enrolled in the rehab program by his frustrated brother, is not looking for anything so profound. Oscar doesn't believe he has a problem, despite the fact that his "recreation" has cost him everything. He resents the counselors, the other addicts, and his brother, all of whom insist he belongs there. The only activity Oscar looks forward to is the spirited, sarcastic conversations that have begun with Alba on the hospital lawn. And so two damaged souls forge a connection. To call it love would be courting disaster since no bright future could possibly exist between a suicidal manic-depressive and a self-deluding junkie. Then one day, in the back pages of a hospital library book, Alba finds a letter written seventy years earlier but never sent. Mary Doherty, who was committed by her husband and taken from her children, left behind secret missives about the atrocities done to her and her belief in an ancient healing power. As Alba pieces together Mary's heartbreaking chronicle, she begins to set her hopes on a different kind of medicine. Brought together by chance, influenced by forces as beautiful and powerful as they are unforeseen, Alba and Oscar will slowly rise from the ashes of despair and self-destruction and, in the midst of righting an old wrong, begin to heal their battered spirits. A superbly crafted, poignant narrative of tragedy and triumph, Lisa Carey's moving third novel is a testament to the surprising resilience of the human heart. Carey, author of In the Country of the Young (2000), again astutely blends realism and magic in this tale of two patients in an upscale Maine rehab center. Alba, 25, has been admitted yearly for 10 years and is currently diagnosed with panic disorder. When Oscar is admitted, they bond immediately, each sensing the possibility of something positive in their lives. Alba then discovers letters written by a patient in the 1930s that were never mailed. The woman, part Abenaki Indian, was a "healer," and her seizures gave her abusive husband the grounds to have her committed. Alba becomes obsessed with the letters this woman wrote to her son up until her death in 1942, and enlists Oscar's help in delivering them to their intended recipient. Like Alba, the reader is moved by the woman's heart-wrenching story of her ability to enter "into the world of souls," and how she was unjustly taken from her children. Although one plot element is resolved a bit too conveniently, this is a haunting and mystical tale. Deborah Donovan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “A sensitive effort from a talented writer.” (Kirkus Reviews) “Touching [and] multilayered.” (BookPage) “Carey is skilled at weaving the disparate elements of the narrative together to reach a satisfying ... resolution....recommended.” (Library Journal) Lisa Carey is the author of The Mermaids Singing , In the Country of the Young , and Love in the Asylum . She lived in Ireland for five years and now resides in Portland, Maine, with her husband and their son. Like the crazy people in most books, Alba Elliott, the protagonist of Lisa Carey's third novel, Love in the Asylum, speak in riddles. But Alba is not like the whimsical muses who haunt the stark hallways and padded cells of most fictional institutions: Her riddles have an odd, slightly depressing logic to them. When asked why she set her house on fire, she answers, "Because I was tired." "Tired of what?" the doctors ask. "Tired of trying to remember all of the things I would have to save if the house caught on fire." After 10 visits to the Abenaki Hospital in the course of her 25 years, Alba has grown exhausted with her own salvation. The bipolar cycle of flying high, self-destructing and then crawling out of the mire no longer suits her, so she's resigned to charting a safe middle course, accepting her illness as her father has urged her to do for years. "Her plan is this: she will take her medication every day for the rest of her life; she will live mentally muzzled and stop wishing for something more exciting." Of course, something more exciting often finds you the second you stop looking for it. Oscar, a fellow patient half-heartedly trying to kick a lifelong romance with drugs and alcohol, takes an interest in Alba the moment he sees her, and the two fall in love. While love betwee