Издания и произведения

Sixteen year olds, Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter, come from different countries and contrasting families, yet they are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works in sickness and in health and whether madness is the price we pay for being what we are. As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the great Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques's brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found. Thomas's…

What is it to be human? This question, as in Birdsong, is at the heart of "Human Traces". The story begins in Brittany where a young, poor boy somehow passes his medical exams and goes to Paris, where he attends the lectures of Charcot, the Parisian neurologist who set the world on its head in the 1870s. With a friend, he sets up a clinic in the mysterious mountain district of Carinthia in south-east Austria. If The Girl at the Lion d'Or was a simple three-movement symphony, Birdsong an opera, Charlotte Gray a complex four-movement symphony and On Green Dolphin Street a concerto, then Human Traces is a Wagnerian grand opera.