In Desolate Heaven

(Paperback)

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Description

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

Reviews

'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 Sunday Times *
'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' * Scotland on Sunday *
'Like one of those dreams where you can come awake, and then fall asleep and continue where you left off' * The Times *
'I would defy anyone not to sit down and read to the end' * Literary Review *
Edric writes a spare craggy prose . . . makes much contemporary fiction that concentrates on the urban wastes of today seem self-indulgent, sentimental and frivolous -- Allan Massie * Scotsman *

Author Bio

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.