LONDON SATYR, THE

The astonishing new historical novel from one of the UK's most talented literary writers.
 
It is the summer of 1891 and London is simmering under an oppressive heatwave. The air is thick with tension and sexual repression. But another wave is about to rock the capital -- one of morality -- as Oliver Wheeler and the puritans of his London Vigilance Committee seek out perversion and aberrant behaviour in all its forms.
 
Charles Webster, an impoverished photographer working for famed actor-manager Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, has been sucked into a shadowy demi-monde which exists beneath the surface of civilized society. It is a world of pornographers and prostitutes, corralled under the sinister leadership of master photographer and manipulator Marlow, to whom Webster illicitly provides theatrical costumes for pornographic shoots.
 
But knowledge of this enterprise has somehow reached the Lyceum's upright theatre manager, Bram Stoker, who suspects Webster's involvement. As the net appears to tighten around Marlow and his cohorts, a member of the aristocracy is accused of killing a child prostitute, and public outrage sweeps the capital. It is the worst possible time for Webster's wife to announce she is to become a professional medium.
 
The London Satyr is a brilliant summoning of the last decade of Victorian England. At a time when public morality has never been more extreme nor superstition more prevalent, below the surface swirls a fetid and ever-quickening current of perversity and exploitation.

ROBERT EDRIC was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize), The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010. He lives in Yorkshire.