Desk-bound traveller

With a new novel each year, Robert Edric cannot have much time for courting London’s literary establishment, but does he stay at home in East Yorkshire? The London Satyr is set in 1890s London and to me, a Londoner, it seems not merely researched but felt, as if its author has tramped the streets and occupied the world of his characters.

With a new novel each year, Robert Edric cannot have much time for courting London’s literary establishment, but does he stay at home in East Yorkshire? The London Satyr is set in 1890s London and to me, a Londoner, it seems not merely researched but felt, as if its author has tramped the streets and occupied the world of his characters. But the same feels true of Edric’s many other novels, and he could not have had time to write them as well as tramp the Arctic (The Broken Lands), Tasmania (Elysium), Zaire (The Book of the Heathen) and so forth, so perhaps he stays at home after all and just wakes up each year with something like a new language in his head, fully formed.