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  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409044383
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

The London Satyr




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

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...

  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409044383
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

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.

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Praise for The London Satyr

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

The Times

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

Daily Mail

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

The Tablet

Gripping and entertaining read... well told and absorbing

Eastern Daily Press

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

Spectator

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

Guardian