The Devil's Beat

An extraordinary novel - Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Howard's End meet The Crucible

A connoisseur of shadows, Edric is excellent on what is truly "devilish" in human beings

Edric is a novelist who makes his own rules and can't be compared with anyone else. The world he has made in this unsettling novel is both familiar and deeply weird; there's a genuine sense of menace beneath the hysteria and superstition

An intriguing scenario which Edric develops with polish and intelligence, immersing himself in small-town Edwardian England

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize), The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010. He lives in Yorkshire.

'We must prise opinion from fact, belief from supposition and guesswork from whatever evidence must exist...' 
 
It is surely a simple case of hysteria. Four young women allegedly witness a terrifying apparition while walking in the woods. Has the devil really revealed himself to them? Are they genuine victims of demonic possession? Or, as most suspect, is their purpose in claiming all of this considerably more prosaic? 
 
The eyes of the country turn to a small Nottinghamshire town, where an inquiry is to be held. Everyone there is living through hard, uncertain times. The king is recently dead. It is a new century - a new world looking to the future. But here, in the ancient heart of England, an old beast stirs... 
 
Four men must examine the substance of the girls' tales and decide their fate: a minister, a doctor, a magistrate, and Merritt, an investigator - a seemingly perfect blend of the rational, the sacred and the judicial. And yet, as the feverish excitement all around them grows ever more widespread and infectious, there is both doubt and conflict among the members of this panel. 
 
The Devil's Beat explores the unforeseeable and unstoppable outcome of this inquiry during an alarming and unsettling time, when the whole of that small world seems in turmoil as, one after another, hitherto dependable natural checks and balances, beliefs and superstitions are challenged and then shattered.

Field Service

With trademark precision, Robert Edric brings to life the tragic and noble work of the War Graves Commission in the wake of the Great War.

There has been a slew of novels commemorating the First World War’s anniversaries. Field Service will be judged one of the best.

A masterly analyst of human behaviour....Carefully nuanced and engaging...Puts the work of most other historical novelists in the shade

I found this deeply moving; a fine tribute to the early work of the War Graves Commission, which I’ll never take for granted again

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (James Tait Black Prize winner 1986), A New Ice Age (runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize 1986), The Book of the Heathen (winner of the WH Smith LIterary Award 2000), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light (shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010). His most recent novel is Sanctuary. He lives in Yorkshire.

Morlancourt, Northern France, 1920 
 
In the aftermath of the world's bloodiest conflict, a small contingent of battle-worn soldiers remains in France. Captain James Reid and his men are tasked with the identification and burial of innumerable corpses as they come to terms with the events of the past four years. 
 
The stark contrast between the realities of burying men in France and the reports of honouring the dead back in Britain is all too clear. But it is only when the daily routine is interrupted by a visit from two women, both seeking solace from their grief, that the men are forced to acknowledge the part they too have played. 
 
With his trademark unerring precision, Robert Edric explores the emotional hinterland which lies behind the work done by the War Graves Commission in the wake of the First World War.

Sanctuary

A lacerating and moving fictionalised portrait of self-destruction - unlike anything hitherto written about the Brontes

A work of art...Edric is one of the most remarkable novelists writing today

Stunning and ambitious...Edric enters fully the mind and inner life of his dissolute (anti-)hero. It would be so easy to fall into pastiche, but a writer as good as he is, is pitch perfect. The reader is encouraged to savour the prose, to absorb the atmosphere and to enter the eerie world of Haworth and its inhabitants. 
 
Edric's portrait of the Reverend Patrick Bronte is masterly and poignant. Branwell's close relationship with Emily, the love he feels for consumptive Anne and the disintegration of his bond with Charlotte who looks on him with resentment and hostility are vividly explored...A moving and imaginatively reconstructed portrait

The book succeeds in poetically entering into the destructive world of a young man of modest talent who finds himself born into a household of genius

Robert Edric has written some of the most interesting and diverse historical fiction of the past thirty years...Edric eschews a conventional plot in favour of vividly realised scenes that build up an extraordinary portrait of a man lurching towards self-destruction

A story which could have emerged from a Bronte novel. A man haunted by his failures is trapped by the secrets of a sequestered household and drawn to his own decline in flinty, lilting prose...A beautiful re-imagining

A masterly, highly evocative, multi-layered tale

Edric's world, though often unsavoury, is also curiously compelling. Lured into its shady precincts, you're unlikely to want to leave.

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (James Tait Black Prize winner 1986), A New Ice Age (runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize 1986), The Book of the Heathen (winner of the WH Smith LIterary Award 2000), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light (shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010). His most recent novel is The Monster’s Lament. He lives in Yorkshire.

Haworth, West Yorkshire, 1848. 
 
Branwell Brontë - unexhibited artist, unacknowledged writer, sacked railwayman, disgraced tutor and spurned lover - finds himself unhappily back in Haworth Parsonage, to face the disappointment of his father and his three sisters, the scale of whose own pseudonymous successes is only just becoming apparent. 
 
With his health failing rapidly, his aspirations abandoned and his once loyal circle of friends shrinking fast, Branwell resorts to a world of secrets, conspiracies and endlessly imagined betrayals. But his spiral of self-destruction only accelerates the sense of his destiny to be a bystander looking across at greatness, and the madness which that realisation will bring…

The Monster's Lament

An extraordinary imagining of the dark arts in war-torn London from one of the most brilliant literary talents around

April 1945. While the Allied Forces administer the killing blow to Nazi Germany, at home London’s teeming underworld of black marketeers, pimps, prostitutes, conmen and thieves prepare for the coming peace. But the man the newspapers call the English Monster, the self-procaimed Antichrist, Aleister Crowley, is making preparations for the future too: for his immortality. 
 
For Crowley’s plan to work, he has to depend upon one of London’s Most Wanted, ambitious gangland boss Tommy Fowler, who, presiding over a crumbling empire, can still get you anything you want - for a price. 
 
And what Crowley wants is a young man, Peter Tait, in Pentonville Prison under sentence of death for murder. Convinced of his innocence but unable to prove it, his only chance of survival lies in the hands of one detective struggling against the odds to win a desperate appeal that has little chance of success. 
 
The Monster’s Lament is an extraordinary journey through a ruined landscape towards an ending more terrible and all-consuming than any of its participants can have imagined. When you’re used to fighting monsters abroad, it is easy to overlook the monsters closer to home…

In Desolate Heaven

A brilliant, atmospheric novel about the emotional aftermath of the First World War.

'It is extraordinary that Robert Edric's fiction isn't more widely acclaimed...true to its title this is a work of bleak accomplishment'

'The agony, the despair and the madness of war, with its troubled aftermath, emerge with a fierceness and starkness...a fine achievement, not swiftly forgotten'

'Like one of those dreams where you can come awake, and then fall asleep and continue where you left off'

'I would defy anyone not to sit down and read to the end'

Edric writes a spare craggy prose . . . makes much contemporary fiction that concentrates on the urban wastes of today seem self-indulgent, sentimental and frivolous

Autumn 1919. Elizabeth Mortlake, companion to her widowed sister-in-law, meets Jameson and Hunter, two ex-officers striving for some new measure of peace and order amid the ever-lengthening shadows of the war - one still hospitalized and awaiting the judgement of a court martial, the other seeking a more personal atonement for his unimaginable sins. Drawn increasingly into their lives here at the calm centre of the changing world, she gradually understands what a fragile peace they now inhabit, and how the ideals and bonds which once sustained and kept the two men alive, now threaten to destroy them completely.

The London Satyr

The astonishing new historical novel from one of the UK's most talented literary writers

A clever, intriguing and very well-written novel about the moral landscape of late-Victorian London

Edric mixes a potent brew... The ending is a masterstroke of the ironic and macabre

Sharply written, wholly engrossing... not just an Edric novel, but the Edric novel

Place, time and atmosphere are conjured with impeccable lightness of touch

Gripping and entertaining read... well told and absorbing

Edric writes with fluency and authority... this book is a masterly evocation of London in the last decade of the nineteenth century

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize), The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010. He lives in Yorkshire

1891. London is simmering in the oppressive summer heat, the air thick with sexual repression. But a wave of morality is about to rock the capital as the puritans of the London Vigilance Committee seek out perversion and aberrant behaviour in all its forms. 
 
Charles Webster, an impoverished photographer working at the Lyceum Theatre, has been sucked into a shadowy demi-monde which exists beneath the surface of civilized society. It is a world of pornographers and prostitutes, orchestrated by master manipulator Marlow, for whom Webster illicitly provides theatrical costumes for pornographic shoots. 
 
But knowledge of this enterprise has somehow reached the Lyceum's upright theatre manager, Bram Stoker, who suspects Webster's involvement. As the net tightens around Marlow and his cohorts and public outrage sweeps the city, a member of the aristocracy is accused of killing a child prostitute...

Salvage

A stunning novel from one of the UK's finest literary writers

Grips the breader from the start with the constant threat of imminent danger, though it is not a conventional thriller, mainly avoiding violence or melodrama and making the nightmare ordinary

This is his 19th novel and - against some hot competition - one of his very best

A carefully thought-out picture of a bleak future that works as a critique of the present

Once again, Edric shows himself to be one of Britain's finest storytellers

Edric's story grips the reader from the start

A superb exploration of what could happen. Gripping from beginning to end

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006), The Kingdom of Ashes and In Zodiac Light, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010.

It is the not too distant future. The Gulf Stream has ceased and the climate is plunged into turmoil. England has changed. 
 
Civil Servant Quinn is dispatched to conduct an audit on a remote plot of land up North, designated for a brand new model town. But he swiftly realises how inflammatory his presence is when confronted by those on the sharp end of the new reality: Owen, a suicidal farmer whose livestock has been destroyed after a slew of viruses; Winston, a disillusioned journalist with a gallery of photos that show the truth about the site; and Pollard, the local man of God whose faith is up for sale. 
 
But it is Anna, Quinn's sometime girlfriend, in charge of filling the dead cattle pits, who faces the deepest abyss of all. As the heavens open once again, the mountains of toxic soil that surround the site slowly begin to shift, and Quinn will face the ultimate test of his integrity.

Peacetime

A stunningly atmospheric and powerful new novel set in 1946 at The Wash on the Fenland coast.

'As carefully crafted as the glass bowls that Jacob makes to find solace. It is a novel wrapped or revealed by layer after layer of inferences and resonances, all moving towards a telling symmetry, and the disclosure of simple yet emotional stories of suffering and survival'

'Edric's language has a mythic, almost biblical quality, where every word carries due weight and you have the eerie sense of things being left out . . . what makes Edric's writing profound is his refusal to be tidy or dogmatic . . . he is a great novelist'

'Peacetime gradually unravels the contradictory human impulses that bind lives . . . a moral dissection of loyalty, forgiveness and hatred'

'A novel of ambition and skill, at once a historical meditation, an evocation of a disintegrating society and, perhaps most strikingly, a family melodrama'

'Has a seriousness and a psychological edge that nine out of ten novelists would give their eye teeth to possess'

'A marvel of psychological insight and subtly observed relations. Its spare, unadorned prose has poetic resonance'

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award) and Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002). He is also the author of the widely-acclaimed Song Cycle triology, which comprises Cradle Song, Siren Song and Swan Song.

Late summer 1946: the Wash on the Fenland coast. Into a suspicious and isolated community comes James Mercer, until recently a serving captain in the Engineers, who is now employed in the demolition of redundant gun platforms. A relationship grows between Mercer and the wife and daughter of a soldier who is soon expected home - though he is returning not from active service but from a sentence in military gaol, and his arrival is awaited with anxiety. 
 
Mercer also befriends Mathias, a German prisoner of war engaged in similar work who has no wish to be repatriated; and Jacob, a Jew, former glassmaker and camp survivor, of whose devastated journey to this isolated place Mercer gradually learns. He learns, too, of the bond between the German and the Jew and is drawn further into their history as the ex-soldier finally returns and begins to re-establish his overbearing authority. 
 
In a place where nothing has changed for decades, the agents of destruction and renewal are at work and everyone begins to search for his or her piece of solid ground. As the summer dies, animosities flare, prejudices and enmities are burnished and the six main characters circle each other like the combatants they believe themselves to be - each man or woman constrained by an intractable moral code, the loss of which is unthinkable. And Mercer finds himself caught in the centre as events quicken to their violent and unexpected conclusion. 
 
In his powerful new novel, Edric captures with breathtaking economy the sense of portent and uncertainty shared by a community in the aftermath of conflict - a community for which peacetime is hardly any different to wartime.

In Zodiac Light

The new novel from one of the UK's finest literary writers

A moving portrait of breakdown, casual brutality and locked-in creativity...A fine portrait of an acutely sensitive man

Edric's novel is a beautifully imagined contribution to securing Gurney's posthumous reputation

For more than 20 years now, Robert Edric's inflinching eye for human cruelty has roamed across centuries and continents

Subtle, absorbing novel of poetry, madness and post-war trauma

[Edric's] prose has an impressive emotional weight

A fiction of extraordinary resonance, a text of secret harmonies, upper partials and complex internal logic, executed in prose of beautiful, foreboding plainness. In Zodiac Light is a remarkable, serious, accomplished novel and Edric an author absolutely secure in the originality of his own voice

Deeply moving...Edric accomplishes much with this thoughtful, subtle and moving novel...Above all, he allows us to understand a little more clearly how fragile are the borders of sanity, and how blurred they can become

The novel's delicate counterpoint of psychiatrist and war-damaged poet invites comparison with Pat Barker's Regeneration...Edric is a virtuoso of atmospheric settings

His language is precise and compressed, each word invested with a world of meaning. An uneasy, thought-provoking work which stays with you long after you have finished reading it.

With its shifting, subtle light this is a potent exercise in fictional recuperation

Full...of symbols of oppression and human anonymity, In Zodiac Light is a sound evocation of an artist tragically divorced from his calling

This book reinforces the status of the prolific Edric as one of English fiction's best-kept secrets

Edric succeeds in painting an atmospheric dystopia that is at once unsettling and frightening and laudable for its skilful evocation of the doom and the despair

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and The Kingdom of Ashes.

It is December 1922 and the aftershocks of the First World War continue to make themselves felt. Ex-soldier, poet and composer Ivor Gurney, suffering from increasingly frequent and deepening bouts of paranoid schizophrenia, is transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford. 
 
Neglected by the military and by his own family, and abandoned by all but a notable handful of his friends, Gurney begins a descent into the madness and oblivion which he believes has long been waiting to claim him. 
 
Yet following his arrival at Dartford, there are still those who continue to believe in Gurney's capabilities - in his 'wayward genius'. For a brief period, it seems that he might find some calm and ease in his life, and thus achieve the status so many consider him capable of.

Swan Song

The third stunning literary crime novel in the Song Cycle trilogy, from the acclaimed author of Booker-longlisted PEACETIME, and THE BOOK OF THE HEATHEN.

Praise for Song Cycle Trilogy: 
'Deeply intelligent . . . The vertiginously devious plot twists like a fist round the throat of the reader. Robert Edric makes it impossible for the crime novel to be considered the country cousin of serious literature any longer'

'Edric is a terrific storyteller . . . Impressive stuff'

'In this superior, self-deprecating thriller, the workings of the plot are secondary to the elegiac realism of the story'

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award) and Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002). He is also the author of the Song Cycle Trilogy - which comprises Cradle Song, Siren Song and Swan Song.

Hull, autumn 2005 and private investigator Leo Rivers finds himself at the overheated heart of an inquiry into the savage killing of several young women. Approached by the mother of the chief suspect, he soon discovers not only that this suspect is not involved in the killings, but that several hitherto unconsidered and scarcely credible connections link the murders to a single perpetrator. 
 
In pursuing his case, Rivers has to contend with an ambitious, career-minded Chief of Police, who will stop at nothing to make a name for himself, sacrificing not only Rivers but also his own colleagues along the way. 
 
Set against a backdrop of the Humber and the long and violent destruction of Hull's once-cherished fishing industry, Robert Edric reveals a world of exploitation and ambition; a world of old men who burnish their festering grievances and vanities; and a world of long-suppressed but finally uncontainable brutality, in this final volume of a trilogy of outstanding and acclaimed contemporary noir.

The Kingdom of Ashes

The astonishing new novel from one of the UK's finest literary writers

An impressive tale of love and death in wartime...much contemporary fiction seems inconsequential and fleeting by comparison

Edric handles the many characters and threads of this complex novel with skill...[his] consistent brilliance is astounding

A novel of a particular time and place, but one that poses timeless questions...Very satisfying...He is at his best here

Compelling...Edric has a flawless sense of pace, and an intuitive grasp of character

This compelling, unsettling work brilliantly conveys the ambiguities of operating in this defeated, difficult country

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner),A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002) and Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006). His latest novel, In Zodiac Light, is now available from Doubleday.

Germany, spring 1946. The Nuremberg Trials are underway. Three hundred miles north, in the Rehstadt Institute, a British "Assessment and Evaluation" centre, Alex Foster interrogates a succession of lesser war criminals, exploring their pasts and their crimes, and deciding their futures in the soon-to-be-reborn Germany. 
 
But Rehstadt, a town largely untouched by the war, is a place of old hostilities and burnished hatreds; a place still not entirely at peace; a place where the certainties of the past are still weighed favourably against the deprivations of the present and the vague, uncertain promises of the future. 
 
As spring progresses, and as events in the wider world quicken to their own closely observed conclusion, Alex Foster finds himself at the centre of a conflict involving British, American and German interests; and for the first time in his career he also finds himself compromised - forced into subterfuge and deceit as he struggles to weigh personal convictions and loyalties against the greater political and military good...

Gathering The Water

The stunning novel by the Booker longlisted author of Peacetime

Gathering the Water belongs with a group of his (Edric's) novels whose artistry and resonance constitute one of the most astonishing bodies of work to appear from a single author for a generation.

Gathering the Water is a small novel but one that packs a mighty punch. Stylistically it is superb .....above all though, it is in his marshalling of his themes that Edric proves himself such an accomplished novelist. At one level a book about loss and guilt, loyalty and ambition, madness and reality, Gathering the Water in fact ranges even further in its concerns, contrasting the immutability of nature with the similarly crushing immutability of money and business ........a power-packed, stunningly crafted novel.

Gathering the Water is an admirably serious novel, written in prose as spare as its setting. Its lament for the death of the community is subtle and powerful.

A compelling story ......Robert Edric writes with a steady rhythm that, like the flow of the diverted dam waters, fills in a picture of horror and loss with a sustained and unrelenting force.

Robert Edric was born in 1956. In his writing career, he has been a winner of the 1985 James Tait Black Prize (for Winter Garden), a runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize (for A New Ice Age), a runner-up for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award (for The Book of the Heathen), and in 2002, a Booker longlister (for Peacetime). After The Song Cycle Trilogy, his critically acclaimed series of crime novels set in Hull, Gathering the Water heralds his return to historical literary fiction and was also longlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize. His latest novel, The Kingdom of Ashes, is now available from Doubleday.

It is 1847, northern England, and Charles Weightman has been given the unenviable task of overseeing the flooding of the Forge Valley and evicting its lingering inhabitants. Weightman is heartily resented by these locals, and he himself is increasingly unconvinced both of the wisdom of his appointment and of the integrity and motives of the company men who posted him there. He finds some solace, however, in his enigmatic neighbour, Mary Latimer. Caring for her mad sister, Mary is also an outsider, and a companionship develops between the two of them which offers them both some comfort and support in their mutual isolation. 
 
As winter closes steadily in and as the waters begin to rise in the Forge Valley, it becomes increasingly evident that the man-made deluge cannot be avoided; not by the locals desperate to save their homes, nor by the reluctant agent of their destruction, Weightman himself. 
 
In a masterful new novel, Edric captures powerful human emotions with grace and precision. The hauntingly resonant backdrop to this story of David and Goliath marks Edric's dramatic return to historical literary fiction.

Siren Song

The second stunning literary crime novel in the Song Cycle trilogy from the acclaimed author of Booker-longlisted Peacetime, and The Book of the Heathen.

'Edric is a terrific storyteller but he also provides a pretty accurate picture of modern-day crime and the way that it affects so many people. Impressive stuff'

'Edric keeps his readers - and Rivers - dangling on a tangled string'

'Edric shows his mastery over the complexities of a crime thriller ... Classic whodunit territory and lovers of the genre will find Siren Song right up their street'

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award) and Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002). Cradle Song and Siren Song are the first two books in the Song Cycle Trilogy, the final book, Swan Song, is now available from Doubleday.

When the luxury yacht Helen Brooks was last seen on is found abandoned amid the treacherous marshlands of the Humber Estuary, foul play is suspected. However, in the absence of a body, nothing can be proven. The owner of the yacht, ambitious businessman Simon Fowler, seems unprepared even to offer any sort of explanation as to what Helen was doing on board. 
 
A year later, Hull private investigator Leo Rivers is approached by Alison Brooks, Helen's mother, to investigate both the background to this disappearance and Fowler. Rivers is drawn through a long, hot summer into a world of human trafficking and governmental corruption at every turn. In the stifling heat there are many questions and few people prepared to offer adequate answers. Each unravelled piece of the mystery moves Rivers further from the vanished girl and deeper into a web of exploitation, greed, temptation, revenge and violence, from which even he is unable to extricate himself without unforeseen and tragic consequences...

Cradle Song

Stunning literary crime novel, from the acclaimed author of Booker-longlisted PEACETIME, and THE BOOK OF THE HEATHEN.

'Highly accomplished... Fans can look forward to his usual sharply realised characters operating in a tense, pressured environment'

'A rewarding experience...This is murder at its most foul, crime at the deep end'

'His novel is something substantial and distinctive...Edric has a clear, almost rain-washed style, eminently suitable for his Hull setting...Cradle Song is a strong and serious novel, soberly entertaining and well worth your while'

'Cradle Song is a superbly paced book... This is classic crime noir... Edric can also produce beautiful prose and arresting images as well as incisive social satire... Magnificently achieved'

'Deeply intelligent...Vertiginously devious...Twists like a fist around the throat of the reader'

'A veritable Stanley Kubrik of the world of fiction...Edric makes it impossible for the crime novel to be considered the country cousin of serious literature any longer'

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award) and Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002). Cradle Song is the first book in the Song Cycle Trilogy, which is completed by Siren Song and Swan Song.

An imprisoned paedophile and child murderer unexpectedly appeals his conviction. In return for a reduced sentence, he offers to implicate those involved in the crimes who were never caught; to provide evidence of Police corruption at the time of the original investigation; and, most importantly, to reveal where the corpses of several long-sought, but never found teenage girls are buried. 
 
Unhappy at what may be about to happen, but at the same time desperate to locate the body of his own missing daughter, the father of one of these girls approaches Private Investigator Leo Rivers with a plea for help. 
 
Rivers' enquiries stir cold and bitter memories. Long-dead enmities flare suddenly into violence and a succession of new killings. Everyone involved, then and now, and on both sides of the law, is unprepared for the suddenness and ferocity with which these old embers are fanned back into life. As the investigation progresses, it gathers momentum, and now must speed inexorably to the even greater violence and sadness of its conclusion. 
 
The first of a trilogy of contemporary crime novels set in the city of Hull, Robert Edric's new novel is reminiscent of Chandler and Mosley, and yet remains uniquely British. Against the backdrop of Internet pornography, Police corruption and child murder, this dark and intense novel reads like a game of chess where each piece is invested with a deceptive significance.

The Book Of The Heathen

Robert Edric's breakout book, a stunning novel set in colonial Congo

'Relentless . . . an impressive and disturbing work of art'

'Precise and compelling . . . maintains a relentless hold on the reader's interest . . . a fable about versions of truth and moral responsibility. It also belongs to a very British tradition: the mapping of non-Europe as a nightmare world in which the European psyche confronts its own dark madness'

'Rendered in prose whose steadiness and transparency throw the dark turbulence of what is happening into damning relief'

'A very gripping story . . . the reader is drawn in inexorably to discover what horror lies at the heart of it . . . an apocalyptic fable for today'

'Many respectable judges would put Edric in the top ten of British novelists currently at work . . . as a writer, he specialises in the delicate hint and the game not given away'

'It will be surprising if this year sees a more disturbing or haunting novel'

'Stunning . . . evocatively brings to life the stifling humidity and constant rainfall of the Congo'

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award) and Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002). He is also the author of the widely-acclaimed Song Cycle Trilogy, which comprises Cradle Song, Siren Song and Swan Song.

1897. In an isolated station in the Belgian Congo, an Englishman awaits trial for the murder of a native child. Imprisoned in a makeshift gaol, Nicholas Frere awaits the arrival of the Company's official investigator, while his friend, James Frasier, attempts to determine the circumstances which surround the charge. 
 
The world around them is rapidly changing: the horrors of the Belgian Congo are becoming known and the flow of its once-fabulous wealth is drying up. Unrest flares unstoppably into violence. 
 
Frere's coming trial will seek to determine considerably more than the killing of a child. But at the heart of this conflict lies a secret so dark, so unimaginable, that one man must be willingly destroyed by his possession of it, and the other must both sanction and participate in that destruction. 
 
'More disturbing even than Conrad in his depiction of the heart of darkness . . . it will be surprising if this year sees a more disturbing or haunting novel' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 
 
'Relentless . . . an impressive and disturbing work of art' Robert Nye, Literary Review 
 
'Edric describes a compelling plot in fine, spare prose' David Isaacson, Daily Telegraph

Robert Edric

Shows once more Edric’s unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters

'Shows once more Edric's unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters' The Sunday Times 
________ 
 
The Fens, 1954. Many people have lost everything. Others just want the chance to begin again. For Jimmy Devlin, it's a little of both . . . 
 
It has been another tough winter. The floods are worse than anyone can remember and Fenlands are alive with blackmarketeers, vagabonds and chancers, all trying to make their way. 
 
 
Forced from his home by bailiffs, Jimmy has nothing to his name and needs to make a fresh start. But desperate people have a knack of finding trouble and he is no exception. It doesn’t take long before he’s caught in the wrong business with the wrong people and on the wrong side of the law . . . 
 
With his keen eye and trademark candour, Robert Edric explores what a man is capable of doing when he has nothing to lose.

Robert Edric

Praise for Mercury Falling

Shows once more Edric’s unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters

Books by Robert Edric

Series by Robert Edric

The Song Cycle

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