The Warlow Experiment

Praise

“In a novel premised on stagnation, the incremental but inevitable deterioration of both major characters becomes an unexpectedly gripping drama, fueled by the attraction of repulsion. . .[A] unique and chilling novel.”
—The New York Times Book Review 

“Social dominance, and the violent means used to maintain it, unites the various storylines in The Warlow Experiment. . .Ms. Nathan stages a series of moral awakenings and comeuppances that overturn the expected order of things. . .Warlow’s plight itself is indelible, both pungent and horrifying in its details and profound as a metaphor—a symbol of upper-class barbarity stashed away in the cellar like a telltale heart beating beneath the floorboards.”
—The Wall Street Journal 

“This unusual historical novel will reward readers with the ripe inquiry it makes of a peculiar subject.”
—The Washington Post

“Sardonic comedy takes on deeper resonances in a tale, rich in period detail, of a ruinously backfiring experiment.”
—The Sunday Times, London

“[Nathan has a] delicacy of touch. . .Shocking and convincing. . .The complications that ensue, rooted in the initial wrongness of the experiment, take us into the deep heart of blunted male emotion. . .[An] impressive novel.” 
—The Times Literary Supplement 

“Original and beautifully written, this is a meaty and gripping novel of obsession gone sour.” 
—Daily Mail, London 

“I read Alix Nathan’s beautifully constructed new novel about an experiment most strange at great speed: its sentences, imagery and import call you onward and ever deeper. More than once since I finished I’ve looked down and wondered what might be going on just a few feet below or above me. The Warlow Experiment gets into your head.”
—Laird Hunt, author of The Kind One and In the House in the Dark of the Woods

“Unusual, gripping and emotionally complex—I loved this book.”
—Sally Magnusson, author of The Sealwoman’s Gift

“This is an extraordinary, quite brilliant book.”
—C. J. Sansom, author of Tombland

“A powerful and unsettling novel, both fascinating and infinitely strange.”
—Andrew Taylor, author of The King’s Evil

“An allegory of prison culture at its cruelest. . .[The Warlow Experiment] is a powerful rebuke to the notion that withholding compassion can somehow be corrective. Nathan’s main strength is her keen characterizations of all involved. . .A sturdy historical novel about the perils of pseudoscience.”
—Kirkus Reviews