My father, the tyrant: Robert Edric describes a brutal upbringing

In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels, plus a couple of early efforts under his birth name, G.E. Armitage. I must have read two thirds of this shelf-distending oeuvre, but in none of them have I ever detected the faintest whiff of disguised autobiography. Whether writing about early-Victorian Lakeland, in the 2006 Booker-longlisted Casting the Waters, or reanimating the career of P.T. Barnum (In the Days of the American Museum, 1990), Edric has always worn his detachment, his absolute reluctance to say anything about the person he is, or was, like a rosette.

All this makes My Own Worst Enemy, an account of his immensely tough upbringing in the shadow of the Sheffield steel factories, rather a departure. It is as if Henry James had just favoured us all with a journal of his sexual fantasies, or T.S.