Publisher's Synopsis
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.
'It is extraordinary that Robert Edric's fiction isn't more widely acclaimed . . . The emotional climate of this novel is as freezing as the late autumn Switzerland he so atmospherically evokes . . .True to its title this is a work of bleak accomplishment'
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
'An individual and important book, pared down almost to poetry, dismissing all the usual aspects of suffering in the trenches . . . it sees the war from a new geographical angle . . . I would defy anyone not to sit down and read to the end of this glacial, painful book' Jane Gardam, Literary Review
'Like one of those dreams where you can come awake, then fall asleep and continue where you left off: it has that kind of coherence and necessity.' Robert Nye, The Times
'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
'Writing alert with engaging, persistent life . . . A fine achievement, not swiftly forgotten' Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday
