Summary
Into That Fire
Imogen Lang’s only friend and confidant at medical school in Chicago is the lanky poet Quentin Goodchild, but he wants more than friendship. Unlike most other well-brought-up young women in 1916, Imogen does not want to be a wife. Instead she wants to find a cure for madness. Shattered by her rejection, Quentin heads to Canada where he signs up to fight in the trenches in France, hoping to be killed. While he encounters unspeakable horrors in battle, Imogen faces her own struggles, against the sexism that constrains her and the barbaric practices that are the accepted treatments for the mentally ill. When she hears that Quentin has been killed in France, she falls into a bleak depression that increases her empathy for her patients but also sets her on a collision course with the powers-that-be. And eventually to a realization of what Quentin means to her. Imogen, based on the groundbreaking psychoanalyst Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, speaks truth to power in a world that really would prefer she kept quiet. But, in the end, the biggest truth she needs to tell is to herself.
Reviews
"The impact of this novel is not just intellectual; it’s emotional too. A sweeping story that compels from start to finish." — Toronto Star
"Scenes set on the battlefields of the First World War feel as though they were written by someone
who had been there." — Winnipeg Free Press
"Timeless."— Postmedia
"A galloping, enthralling narrative." — Lori Lansens, bestselling author of The Girls
