Robert Edric Book order

'A small masterpiece' The Spectator My Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely. With a novelist's eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-men's clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman's place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended - though over all of it hovers the vanity and barely-suppressed anger of his own father. My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait both of particular time and place - the Sheffield of half a century ago - and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.

In this final part of the Song Cycle Quartet, published here for the first time, Hull private detective Leo Rivers is approached by a wealthy property developer. The man's only daughter is being blackmailed by a local drug dealer, to whom she owes money and who possesses compromising photographs of her, and Rivers is employed to deliver the money demanded and to keep the girl away from all that threatens to destroy both her and her father's ambitions in the city. It is soon clear to Rivers, however, that there is considerably more to this transaction than meets the eye, and that he is being used by both men to their own illegal and profitable ends. Following a vicious assault on Rivers and the death of two innocent men, the private detective is drawn into a world of drug-financed gang warfare and police corruption, each side playing him off against the other, until in a final unstoppable explosion of violence and killing, he is lucky to escape with his own life.

'Shows once more Edric's unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters' The Sunday Times The Fens, 1954. It doesn't take long before he's caught in the wrong business with the wrong people and on the wrong side of the law .

Morlancourt, Northern France, 1920In the aftermath of the world's bloodiest conflict, a small contingent of battle-worn soldiers remains in France. Captain James Reid and his men are tasked with the identification and burial of innumerable corpses as they come to terms with the events of the past four years.

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.

Haworth, West Yorkshire, 1848. Branwell Brontë - unexhibited artist, unacknowledged writer, sacked railwayman, disgraced tutor and spurned lover - finds himself unhappily back in Haworth Parsonage, to face the disappointment of his father and his three sisters, the scale of whose own pseudonymous successes is only just becoming apparent. With his health failing rapidly, his aspirations abandoned and his once loyal circle of friends shrinking fast, Branwell resorts to a world of secrets, conspiracies and endlessly imagined betrayals. But his spiral of self-destruction only accelerates the sense of his destiny to be a bystander looking across at greatness, and the madness which that realisation will bringâe¦

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.