'A small masterpiece' The SpectatorMy Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely.With a novelist's eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-men's clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woma...

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 waiti...

The Broken Lands-a treacherous labyrinth of ice through which the fabled Northwest Passage was sought for centuries. Cabot, Frobisher, Hudson, Parry and Ross were all defeated, and the names on the maps testify to their despair: Bay of God's Mercy, the Devil's Cape, Savage Isles, and Repulse Bay.Determined to succeed where the rest had failed, Sir John Franklin-"the Lion of the Arctic"-set sail from Greenland in 1845. His two ships, the Erebus and the Terror

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 Fowle...

Morlancourt, Northern France, 1920In 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 r...

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 ...

'Shows once more Edric’s unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters' The Sunday TimesThe Fenlands, 1954It is a tough winter; the temperatures have fallen too low too quickly and the floods are the worst anyone can remember.Most people have lost everything but there are some who have found themselves eager for the chance at a new start. For Jimmy Devlin, it’s a little of both.Forced from his home by...

'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 Nottingham...

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, ...

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 ...

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,...

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 certain...