Runa

In 1884 Paris, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot's hypnosis demonstrations at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière draw fascinated crowds from across Europe, eager to watch him "cure" the hysterical women in his care. Among his new patients is Runa, a young woman who resists every treatment offered to her - and who has been leaving cryptic messages across the city that others have started to notice.

Swiss medical student Jori Hell, ambitious and drawn to Charcot's methods, proposes something no one has attempted before: a surgical procedure to remove madness directly from a patient's brain. But Runa knows something about Jori's past that he has worked hard to keep buried.

Weaving fiction around the real history of the Salpêtrière and its infamous director, Runa is a dark, atmospheric debut novel set at the fault line between medicine, spectacle, and cruelty in nineteenth-century Paris.