The Existence of Amanda Blake

GENERAL FICTION

Pages: 254 Ratings:

Book Format: Choose an option

Free standard delivery on UK orders over £35

*Your order will be dispatched after the publication date of 27-02-2026

It is 1957, and Amanda Blake is admitted, against her will, to Bristol Mental Hospital.

Since her first breakdown, her parents have interpreted any step towards independence as proof of madness. They constantly invalidate, ignore, and gaslight her to the point where she can no longer distinguish her thoughts from theirs. She feels unheard and invisible, as though she does not exist.

Although she hears the voice of her dead grandmother, a junior psychiatrist believes her distress is a reaction to her parents’ oppression rather than a primary illness. The consultant in charge, however, aligns himself with her parents and escalates her treatment.

When her only ally, a compassionate nurse, is dismissed from the ward, Amanda is left isolated and pressured towards irreversible surgery.

Her whole existence is under threat.

Rica Newbery is a retired psychiatrist living in Bristol with her husband and beloved elkhound, not too far from their two children and families, who visit often. After she retired, she did an OU course in Creative Writing and wrote her first novel: Reluctant Courage, inspired by her mother’s childhood experience of Nazi occupation in Oslo. Her fascination for psychiatry began in childhood, influenced by her aunt and uncle, who suffered bipolar illness, and later inspired by RD Laing, who wrote The Divided Self.