Perlman's Ordeal Author:Brooks Hansen An enthralling novel about spiritualism, the symphony, and the lost city of Atlantis. London, 1906. Dr. August Perlman-music lover, opium addict, and pioneer of "clinical suggestion"-is on his way to the symphony when a teenage girl is brought to his office. Sylvie Blum is catatonic, unwashed, and dehydrated. It seems that another girl's person... more »ality is living inside her. Perlman goes to the symphony anyway, and meets the charismatic spiritualist Madame Helena Barrett, who soon gets young Sylvie to talk. Her story bears astonishing resemblances to the myth of Atlantis. The girl within the girl says she once lived there. The doctor wants to suppress her story; the spiritualist is desperate to hear it told. And so they battle for the soul of the girl, both in London and in the world of wonders that is the imagination. Their conflict is overshadowed by the ghost of Madame's late brother, a composer whose life and work are brilliantly imagined by the author. Brooks Hansen's novel The Chess Garden was acclaimed as "a marvel of attention to the things of this world, and worlds beyond" (Jay Parini, The New York Times Book Review). In Perlman's Ordeal, he once again takes the world of myth and brings it keenly to life in the pages of a novel.« less