Excerpt from The Ballroom by Anna Hope, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She shook her head, muttering, "There was no damage. Only the glass, and I'll pay for that. I've already said. I'll find a way."

He bent down and wrote in his book.

"I'm not mad," she said, louder now. "Not like those women in that room, anyhow."

He carried on writing.

The room got closer then, darker. Pulsing. Her face was hot. Bladder--hot.

"What are you writing?"

He ignored her.

"What are you writing?" She raised her voice. Still, he ignored her. The only sound the scratching of his pen. The furniture, heavy and silent, watching her too.

She hit the table in front of him. When he didn't look up, she hit it again, stood and smacked her hand right down on his papers, his pen clattering to the floor. The ink splattered over his hand. He snapped back in his chair. Took a bell and rang it, and two nurses appeared, as though they had been waiting in the hall just for this.

"It appears Miss Fay is feeling violent. Please take her downstairs. We can finish the assessment when she's calm."

The nurses grabbed her, but she landed a bite on one of their arms and wrested herself free. And then—-the door—-not locked, running across the entrance hall, the black flowers. The big front door, unlocked too, and her outside on the steps, and the fresh air smacking her face, and her gasping for it, sucking it down, pelting across the gravel. Whistles blaring, shrill and hard. A nurse making toward her. Her turning to the left, to the far side of the building. Then only more buildings, and running from them too, out across the grass. A cricket pitch. Tall trees. Lungs burning. This way only fields, brown and muddy, stretching out, and sheep, and a lane ahead. The top of a small rise. Two men, standing in a hole. One of them waving his arms, shouting. Turning, seeing the nurses behind her, gaining on her. Swerving to miss them, but slipping in the mud, her ankle turning over and her falling, hard onto her front, pitching and rolling down the hill.

The fierce slap of mud. Everything red and black. A hot wetness spreading between her legs.

A face before her, a dark man—-hand stretched out, palm open. "Are you all right there?"

People around her. Upon her. She on her hands and knees, spitting black earth to the ground. Her arms, yanked behind her back. Pain tearing as she was pulled up and made to stand by people she couldn't see.

The dark man there still. Standing, watching her. A little way apart. Looking as if he pitied her.

No one pitied her.

"What?" she screamed at him. "What are you looking at?"

Excerpted from The Ballroom by Anna Hope. Copyright © 2016 by Anne Hope. Excerpted by permission of Random House, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.