Nina In Utopia
by Miranda Miller
Nina In Utopia is the breathtaking new novel from one of the most original women writers in the U.K., taking in time travel, Bedlam and the mad Victorian painter, Richard Dadd. London, 1854: Nina, the wife of an ambitious doctor, is heavily traumatized by the death of her young daughter and then mysteriously transported to the capital 150 years later. A tourist in the twenty-first century, she believes she is witnessing a Utopia, with the grime and evil of Victorian London expunged. She also embarks on a brief affair with a solicitous lover who introduces her to reality t.v., clubbing and takeaway curry. Returning to her own time, her husband takes fright hearing her experiences and has her committed to Bedlam, where she meets Richard Dadd and finds another Utopia under the charge of a doctor with twenty-first century ideas on patient rehabilitation. Meanwhile, her husband is on a collision course with her lover who is travelling to find her from another time. . .