Description: Where Madness Lies is a story about the high price of repression, and how one woman, who lost nearly everything, must be willing to reveal the failures of the past in order to save future generations.

Verdict: Germany, 1934. Rigmor, a young Jewish woman is a patient at Sonnenstein, a premier psychiatric institution known for their curative treatments. But with the tide of eugenics and the Nazis’ rise to power, Rigmor is swept up in a campaign to rid Germany of the mentally ill.

USA, 1984. Sabine, battling crippling panic and depression commits herself to McLean Hospital, but in doing so she has unwittingly agreed to give up her baby.

Linking these two generations of women is Inga, who did everything in her power to help her sister, Rigmor. Now with her granddaughter, Sabine, Inga is given a second chance to free someone she loves from oppressive forces, both within and without.

This is a story about hope and redemption, about what we pass on, both genetically and culturally. It is about the high price of repression, and how one woman, who lost nearly everything, must be willing to reveal the failures of the past in order to save future generations.

With chilling echoes of our time, Where Madness Lies is based on a true story of the author’s own family.

In what has to be one of the most thought-provoking, most heartfelt, most genuinely heartfelt reads of this, or perhaps even the past three or four years, Sylvia True’s simply incredible new novel Where Madness Lies is not only based on a true family story, but brings to light the echoes still resonating within our very own time.

Expertly weaving, and yet never once over-accentuating, together two generations - a grandmother who has lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany in 1934 and a granddaughter who is experiencing an episode of mental illness in Boston in the 1980’s - the subject matter alone might be a hard swallow for the reader re: mental health, but I would implore you to stick with it, as the book is not a harbinger, but instead shines a light.

With the granddaughter of the story unknowing that mental illness is a carefully guarded family secret, this layered story soon becomes a rather masterful tome, and therein a compelling read from start to finish.

For when eugenics and sterilization were important tools in Nazi exterminations of the mentally ill, in order to protect future Germans, Where Madness Lies delivers a rueful nod to a period of history that is rarely written about, whilst at the same time, author True delivers us a series of characters that we quickly become deeply attached to.

It will leave you angry, frustrated, fascinated, and oh-so much more, whilst at the same time hopefully teaching you something new about a subject with which you might well have thought you were already deeply familiar with.

in closing, such descriptions contained of this so-named Nazi cleansing are (and always have been) deeply disturbing, and I would go as far as suggesting stomach wrenching.

Ergo, we can only hope that society is finally beginning to understand that mental illness should not be hidden, but must be handled compassionately. Therefore, this book Where Madness Lies by Sylvia True should be required reading for anyone who has had a family member impacted by mental illness; whether it be linked to these vile acts that sewed the seeds in Germany, or just acts of life, in general.

About the Author - Sylvia True, author of the popular novel The Wednesday Group, was born in Manchester, England to parents who were refugees from Germany. She moved to the US at the age of five, and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband and dogs where she teaches high school chemistry.

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