The Monster's Lament
  • Published: 15 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780552777100
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $27.99

The Monster's Lament

Formats & editions
EBook
28 Mar 2013
Paperback
15 Mar 2014
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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.
  • Published: 15 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780552777100
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $27.99
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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 Devil's Beat
The London Satyr
Salvage
In Zodiac Light
See all

Praise for The Monster's Lament

A wonderfully edgy piece of wartime noir

D.J. Taylor, Independent

Macabre twists keep the pages turning

James Urquhart, Financial Times

A masterly, highly evocative, multi-layered tale

Mail on Sunday (Eire)

Fabulously atmospheric

Bookseller

Edric's world, though often unsavoury, is also curiously compelling. Lured into its shady precincts, you're unlikely to want to leave.

David Grylls, Sunday Times

A darkly disturbing novel

Hull Daily Mail

A connoisseur of shadows, Edric is excellent on what is truly "devilish" in human beings

The Sunday Times

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

The Times

Another brilliant offering from Edric

The Lady

An intriguing scenario which Edric develops with polish and intelligence, immersing himself in small-town Edwardian England

Daily Mail