Sacred Ends - Couverture souple

Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, broadcaster and cultural commentator. A Visiting Professor at King s College London, she is former President of the campaigning writers association, English PEN and is Chair of London s Freud Museum. 

Born in Poland, Lisa Appignanesi grew up in Paris and then in the province of Quebec first in a small Laurentian town, subsequently in Montreal. She attended McGill University, where she wrote for and was Features Editor of the McGill Daily; spent a summer working for the Canadian Press, another doubling as a waitress and student at the Sorbonne. A Bachelor's degree in Honours English was followed by a Masters which included a thesis on Edgar Allen Poe. During that last year at McGill, she also taught at Loyola College.

Restless with genre and branding, Appignanesi's fiction has moved across them  romance, saga, thrillers, the historical novel, a comedy in letters, a novel of return  while her non-fiction moved from history to cultural commentary and analysis, to family memoir. She has also made several television films, including a film for French television on Salman Rushdie. She has presented and scripted various radio programmes and series, such as 'The Case of Sigmund Freud', 'Freudian Slips', and 'Archive on Four: Freud v Jung', for BBC Radio 4, as well as presenting Night Waves for Radio 3 and appearing on Radio 4 s Saturday Review. She has frequently appeared as a cultural commentator on radio and television and written reviews and features for various newspapers, including The Independent, The Guardian, The Observerand The Telegraph.

She has given guest lectures across Britain, taught writing workshops and served on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, on the Council of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In researching The Memory Man, she became a Fellow of the Brain and Behaviour Laboratory at the Open University and shadowed Professor Steven Rose's group which works on memory, a subject which long fascinated her and is also at the centre of her family memoir, Losing the Dead which came out in a new edition in 2013. As Deputy President of English PEN, and then its President, (2002-2011) she led the 'Free Expression is no Offence' campaign against the Incitement to Religious Hatred legislation and campaigned for an end to the Blasphemy Laws and reform to the visa system and libel laws.  She also helped to establish the PEN PINTER PRIZE for writers of courage in Britain and abroad; and worked to site Antony Gormley s commemorative WITNESS chair in the British Library Plaza.

Her award-winning Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present appeared to great critical acclaim, and was followed by the provocative All About Love:  Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion. Her new book Trials of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness again delves into the history of psychiatry, investigating the rise of the expert psychiatric witness through remarkable trials of passion. For her The Brain and the Mind series at King s College London where she is a Visiting Professor, she received a Wellcome Trust People Award. 

Her OBE is for services to literature.

Paris, 1990. Comte de Landois has ordered his wife Marguerite to travel from Paris, to join him in the Loire valley. Her journey into the pastoral quiet is shattered by the appearance of a dead man on the railway tracks. Who is he, and why does Marguerite s young travelling companion pale when he sees him? When the Comte presents Marguerite with an adopted baby, and his sudden friendship with local clerics imposes new rules and regulations on her behavior, things start to take a sinister and troubling turn. The sister of her young companion goes missing and so Marguerite calls in Chief Inspector Durand to help hunt her down. Together they begin to unravel a tangled world of small-town secrets, sacred ends and unholy loves. Intriguing, chilling and lyrical, Sacred Ends is a rich and complex page-turner of a thriller that brings the Belle Époque to life before soaring to its astonishing conclusion.