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...

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

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter