The Training Patient: A Novel (The Karnac Library) - Softcover

'Trainee psychotherapist Gail May's first patient, Alena Sokol, carries a burden of secrets and loss that has rendered her almost incapable of speech. Gail struggles to help Alena break her silence, all the while coping with a lover she isn't quite sure of and a teenage son in the throes of first love. In this compelling, atmospheric novel we follow Gail from London to Prague as she bends the rules of the client/patient relationship to breaking point. In the process she is forced to face up to her own sense of abandonment, and come to terms with her past and present.'--Heather Richardson, author of Magdeburg'Anna Fodorova has taken her familiarity with psychoanalysis and turned it into something that is at once a gentle multi-layered comedy of errors and a taut mystery, a mystery so full of red herrings you could make a stargazy pie from them. Her characters are richly imagined and her situations complex, alarming and absurd. Her earnest, over-imaginative but well intentioned protagonist Gail May stumbles from one discovery to another, breaking rule after rule, suspecting that her patients are not telling her the truth, as she lies to her own analyst and supervisors.'--Cherry Potts, author of Mosaic of Air, and editor for Arachne Press'The Training Patient had me instantly hooked. Fodorova's narrative artfully integrates the complex relationship between patient and therapist, the arena of the therapeutic world, and the often untold story of the significance of the patient to the therapist into a dramatic, readable and thought-provoking story. Whether you have been in therapy, or know nothing about that world of mind games, Fodorova's acute observations of the human psyche, her gentle, almost understated humour, and her easy relationship with her talents as story teller will leave you feeling you know a little bit more of what it means to be human.'--Jacqueline Walker, author of Pilgrim State

Gail May, a trainee therapist, is seeing her first patient, that all-important person on whose case study her qualification depends. As a trainee, Gail is careful to adhere to all the therapeutic rules. What she finds most difficult is that for a long time her patient, an Eastern European woman who believes she is being stalked, hardly ever speaks. Feeling starved of information, Gail begins to resort to increasingly unorthodox means. With Gail's private life falling apart her interest in her patient intensifies, growing into an obsession. When the lines between fiction and reality, between intrusion and therapy, become dangerously confused, Gail will have to face the consequences of her actions.