THE GHOST GARDEN

• Perfect for readers of Mark Lukach's My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward, this is a rare work of narrative non-fiction that beautifully illuminates a world most of us try not to see, a world most writers don't have access to: the daily lives of the severely mentally ill, who are medicated, marginalized, locked away and shunned
• For the past decade, the severely ill patients of the wards of a prominent mental health hospital in Montreal have found a friend in Susan Doherty, who volunteers there and then follows the people she befriends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days – with their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, challenging the ways we think about people with mental illness
• The spine of The Ghost Garden is Caroline Evans (pseudonym), a woman in her early sixties whom Susan has known since she was a school girl, who has been through it all, including the way the justice system treats the severely mentally ill