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  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409032496
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

Peacetime



A stunningly atmospheric and powerful new novel set in 1946 at The Wash on the Fenland coast.

Late summer 1946: the Wash on the Fenland coast. Into a suspicious and isolated community comes James Mercer, until recently a serving captain in the Engineers, who is now employed in the demolition of redundant gun platforms. A relationship grows between Mercer and the wife and daughter of a soldier who is soon expected home - though he is returning not from active service but from a sentence in military gaol, and his arrival is awaited with anxiety.

Mercer also befriends Mathias, a German prisoner of war engaged in similar work who has no wish to be repatriated; and Jacob, a Jew, former glassmaker and camp survivor, of whose devastated journey to this isolated place Mercer gradually learns. He learns, too, of the bond between the German and the Jew and is drawn further into their history as the ex-soldier finally returns and begins to re-establish his overbearing authority.

In a place where nothing has changed for decades, the agents of destruction and renewal are at work and everyone begins to search for his or her piece of solid ground. As the summer dies, animosities flare, prejudices and enmities are burnished and the six main characters circle each other like the combatants they believe themselves to be - each man or woman constrained by an intractable moral code, the loss of which is unthinkable. And Mercer finds himself caught in the centre as events quicken to their violent and unexpected conclusion.

In his powerful new novel, Edric captures with breathtaking economy the sense of portent and uncertainty shared by a community in the aftermath of conflict - a community for which peacetime is hardly any different to wartime.

  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409032496
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

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 Peacetime

'As carefully crafted as the glass bowls that Jacob makes to find solace. It is a novel wrapped or revealed by layer after layer of inferences and resonances, all moving towards a telling symmetry, and the disclosure of simple yet emotional stories of suffering and survival'

James Hopkin, Independent on Sunday

'Edric's language has a mythic, almost biblical quality, where every word carries due weight and you have the eerie sense of things being left out . . . what makes Edric's writing profound is his refusal to be tidy or dogmatic . . . he is a great novelist'

John de Falbe, Spectator

'Peacetime gradually unravels the contradictory human impulses that bind lives . . . a moral dissection of loyalty, forgiveness and hatred'

James Urquhart, The Times

'A novel of ambition and skill, at once a historical meditation, an evocation of a disintegrating society and, perhaps most strikingly, a family melodrama'

Francis Gilbert, New Statesman

'Has a seriousness and a psychological edge that nine out of ten novelists would give their eye teeth to possess'

D.J. Taylor, The Sunday Times

'A marvel of psychological insight and subtly observed relations. Its spare, unadorned prose has poetic resonance'

Ian Thompson, Guardian