The Pied Piper's Poison - Hardcover

'It is winter 1946 and Robert Watt a young Army doctor, is sent to a camp in southern Poland, charged with discovering why refugees are dying of a hideous and unidentifiable disease. Is the camp being used by Russian doctors as a macabre experiment into the effects of radiation? Or are the symptoms of the disease as Watt's misanthropic colleague Arthur Lee believes proof of a poison that lurks within the human psyche.

This account of a young man adrift and seeking solace in medical certainties is deftly interwoven with pages from Arthur's research paper on that most enduring of folk myths, the Pied Piper of Hamelin... These parallel narratives lead to a climax which is at once genuinely shocking and a hugely satisfying resolution to the mystery. Wallace's book is a grainy, honest attempt to probe those dark areas we give novelists sanction to investigate. As such, it is both highly ambitious and stunningly successful.' - PETER WHITTAKER, Independent

'Kafka's Metamorphosis, Suskind's Perfume and David Lynch's Twin Peaks all rolled into one - sounds good? If so, then read Wallace's ambitious first novel, The Pied Piper's Poison. It is a heady mature of historical drama, romance and moral allegory. Wallace's prose style is remarkably fluent and never dull,' - TOM ANGIER, Literary Review

'This young Edinburgh-based writer is the first discovery of the New Year. A superbly imagined, expertly executed two-stream historical novel, linking early Cold War Europe with the horrific, legacy of the Thirty Years War,' - Scotsman

'Assured, ambitious ... The novel's true achievement lies in its depiction of the chaos, despair, and privations which poisoned both victors and vanquished In the aftermath of the Second World War ... a fascinating first novel.' - MICHAEL ARDITTI, The Times

'In the wake of AIDS and Ebola, our latterday fascination with disease and its social implications has been taken up in this brilliant first novel. What really went on in rat-infested Hamelin? And was the same Pied Piper force at work in the winter of 1946 in a refugee camp in southern Poland, causing inmates to fall prey to a hideous disease? A young doctor investigates suggestions of an hallucinogenic fungus, Russian radiation experiments and something darker - deep in the human soul.' - JENNIFER SELWAY, Express on Sunday

'A memorable first novel, set in a quarantine camp in Poland in the bitter winter of 1946, in which a newly-qualified Scots doctor is set to investigating a horrific but unidentifiable disease and begins to discover links with the original Pied Piper tale.' - OWEN KELLY, Irish News