AN AWARD-winning author has turned his attentions from the Brontë family to the victims of the First World War.
Robert Edric’s last novel Sanctuary reimagined the story of the Brontë family by focusing on the sisters’ tortured sibling Branwell.
His book was described as a lacerating and moving fictionalised portrait of the self-destruction of one of literary history’s great bystanders.
Edric portrayed Branwell as an unexhibited artist, unacknowledged writer, sacked railwayman, disgraced tutor and spurned lover.
In his latest novel Field Service, Edric shifts the action to Morlancourt in northern France in 1920.
In the aftermath of the world’s bloodiest conflict, a small contingent of battle-weary soldiers remains in France.
Captain James Reid and his compatriots are tasked with the identification and burial of innumerable corpses as they assimilate the events of the past four years.
The stark contrast between the realities of burying men many in France and the reports of honouring the dead back in Britain is all too clear.
But it is only when the daily routine is interrupted by a visit from two women, both seeking solace from their grief, that the men are forced to acknowledge the part they played.
Field Service is described as a startlingly original novel about human nature and the power of grief.
Edric is said to explore the emotional hinterland which lies behind the work done by the War Graves Commission with “unerring precision and lacerating honesty”.
Robert Edric was born in 1956, and his award-winning or nominated books include Winter Garden, The Book of The Heathen, In Zodiac Light and Gathering The Water.
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