Sanctuary

A work of art...Edric is one of the most remarkable novelists writing today -- Allan Massie * The Scotsman * Stunning and ambitious...Edric enters fully the mind and inner life of his dissolute (anti-)hero. It would be so easy to fall into pastiche, but a writer as good as he is, is pitch perfect. The reader is encouraged to savour the prose, to absorb the atmosphere and to enter the eerie world of Haworth and its inhabitants. Edric's portrait of the Reverend Patrick Bronte is masterly and poignant. Branwell's close relationship with Emily, the love he feels for consumptive Anne and the disintegration of his bond with Charlotte who looks on him with resentment and hostility are vividly explored...A moving and imaginatively reconstructed portrait -- Paula Byrne * The Times * The book succeeds in poetically entering into the destructive world of a young man of modest talent who finds himself born into a household of genius -- Jane Jakeman * Independent on Sunday * Robert Edric has written some of the most interesting and diverse historical fiction of the past thirty years...Edric eschews a conventional plot in favour of vividly realised scenes that build up an extraordinary portrait of a man lurching towards self-destruction -- Nick Rennison * Sunday Times * A story which could have emerged from a Bronte novel. A man haunted by his failures is trapped by the secrets of a sequestered household and drawn to his own decline in flinty, lilting prose...A beautiful re-imagining * Metro *