Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, this novel centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare in High Beach Private Asylum At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen This novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness