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Peter Everett was born in Hull, east Yorkshire in 1931, and began writing at the age of nineteen. He is the author of seven previous novels: A Day of Dwarfs, The Instrument, Negatives (which won the 1964 Somerset Maugham Award), A Death in Ireland, The Fetch, Visions of Heydritch and Matisse's War. He has also written for both television and radio. He lives in Sheffield.
Everett's gift for fictionalizing the life of an artist to trace some of the tangled roots of creativity was shown in his last novel, The Voyages of Alfred Wallis. The hero of this new book is E.J. Bellocq, a photographer of whores in the brothels of Storyville, New Orleans, in the first decade of the 20th century. Unflinching in the face of deviant behaviour of all kinds (paedophilia, fetishism, masochism, rape, murder, to name but a handful), Everett finds little fountains of kindness and love in a wasteland of moral corruption. His hero, whose anguish remains to some extent opaque, is nevertheless portrayed as a sensitive well-meaning man who is more sympathetic than pathetic. The writing is tough and vivid, the imagination that powers it teemingly fertile. This is an admirably uncomfortable book by a fine and original writer. (Kirkus UK)
