Novelist and critic Tom McCarthy, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of 'C', introduces Octave Mirbeau's classic 'The Torture Garden'.
Once described as “the most sickening work of art of the nineteenth century”, Mirbeau’s sensual and disturbing novel follows a young man’s journey to the ends of desire and depravity in a grand Chinese palace garden where torture is enjoyed, and practiced, as a form of art itself.