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In 2008, at the age of fifty-one, André Alexis published his second novel. He had come rather late to the game, putting out his first collection of short stories at thirty-seven and his debut novel a few years later. But his work was well received, and that first novel, Childhood, garnered him a brace of major literary prizes. Four hundred and eighty pages long and a decade in the making, Asylum was a suitably ambitious follow-up. Exploring the intersecting lives of a cast of characters in Ottawa during the early Brian Mulroney administration, the action is driven by a bureaucratic hero...