In Zodiac Light
  • Published: 1 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780552774185
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $28.99

In Zodiac Light

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Paperback
1 Oct 2009
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The new novel from one of the UK's finest literary writers

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.
  • Published: 1 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780552774185
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $28.99
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About the author

Robert Edric

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.

Also by Robert Edric

Mercury Falling
Field Service
Sanctuary
The Monster's Lament
The Devil's Beat
The London Satyr
Salvage
See all

Praise for In Zodiac Light

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

Telegraph

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

Sunday Times Culture Magazine

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

The Times

[Edric's] prose has an impressive emotional weight

Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, Guardian

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

Sunday Times

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

Yorkshire Evening Post

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

Independent

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

London Review of Books

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.

Historical Novels Review

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

Telegraph

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

Glasgow Herald

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

Irish Examiner

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

Sunday Times