The writing is brilliantly evocative of an era when the effects of rationing were commonplace, when there was still National Service and BBC radio plays were an evening's entertainment. -- Angela Cooke * Daily Express *
What's she's achieved is quite remarkable... no ordinary book. -- Sue Cooke * Woman's Weekly *
This is a study in saintly forbearance, but also in the innocence of a time that knew little of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, was shocked by sexual deviance, and when the Freudian precepts we take for granted were not yet in place. -- Lesley White * Sunday Times Culture *
A Secret Madness is a poignant and brave account of a marriage struggling to survive against the dark shadows of an illness for which there is still no cure. Essential reading for anyone attempting to understand and cope with OCD. -- Shereen Low * Birmingham Post *
A superb, tragic period piece. -- Ian Samson * The Guardian *
There are valuable lessons for many of us in her book. -- Dr Thomas Stuttaford * The Times (T2) *
Drawing on her vivid recollections, Bass has written a powerfully compelling book that captures the searing loneliness of a marriage to a man trapped within his illness. -- Julie Wheelwright * Independent *
This gripping, moving and obsessively readable book will ring bells with anyone who's ever had a 'difficult marriage'. * Fay Weldon *
It's a harrowing and thought-provoking book, and should cure any nostalgia for the way we lived in the fifties. The reader feels the author's lonely plight acutely. And one must admire a woman, isolated and unsupported, who uses her own intelligence to construct sense in the strange and frightening world into which her marriage took her. And one who has such emotional stamina. * Hilary Mantel *
