This 600 page novel took the author 30 years to complete and was eventually finished when the author was diagnosed with cancer and feared that he would lose his sight. The text is a supposed confession by Edward Glyver to the killing of two men and the story that led up to the events. One man was a totally innocent stranger whilst the other was a lifelong enemy.
The story is narrated mainly in first person by Glyver and interspersed , here and there, with letters and quotations by various others. Glyver's academic future is ruined at an early stage by a schoolfriend who sets him up for the theft of a book causing him to be expelled and leaving him with no chance to continue to university. The schoolfriend is A P Daunt, son of a rector at a stately home called Evenwood, seat of the 26th Baron Tansor. This connection is to have strange repercussions in Glyver's future life but for the time being he travels to Heidelberg to study there and spends some time abroad. He is able to do this due to the mysterious legacy of 200 sovereigns in a box from an old friend of his mother's who he recollects visiting them.
During Glyver's travels he gains an interest in antiquarian books but returns to England when his mother dies and sets himself the task to sort out and put into order his mother's papers and household records. His mother had earned a living as a writer working under a pseudonym. As he workd through the papers he is puzzled by some references to an earlier incident involving his mother and a friend of hers and a journey to France. Gradually it becomes clear to him that he is not who he thought he was and there are many secrets waiting for him discover. The mystery is intricate and complex and it is the coincidental employment he gains with a solicitor, Mr Tredgold, in London that helps him to unravel the story. But this unravelling sets him on an obsessive and doomed course.
Full of atmospheric Victorian details from London's underworld and elsewhere we compulsively follow Edward Glyver on his fateful journey. This book was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and received with critical aclaim
'An engrossing and complicated tale of deception, heartlessness and wild justice, one that touches on nearly every aspect of Victorian society' [Washington Post]
'a refreshing dedication to the art of storytelling' [Time Out]
'[Edward Glyver] is an outstanding creation: bibliophile, corporate spy, opium addict, he teeters on the brink of sanity, yet remains frenetically eleoquent. Cox lovingly recreates the atmosphere of the period' [Daily Mail]
