The Book of the Heathen, Robert Edric (Used)

1897. In an isolated station in the Belgian Congo, an Englishman awaits trial for the murder of a native child, while his friend attempts to discover the circumstances surrounding the charge. The world around them is rapidly changing: the horrors of colonial Africa are becoming known and the flow of its once-fabulous wealth is drying up.

But there is even more than the death of a child at the heart of this conflict. There is a secret so dark, so unimaginable, that one man must be willingly destroyed by his possession of it, and the other must participate in that destruction.

'Many respectable judges would put Edric in the top ten of British novelists currently at work ... as a writer, he specialises in the delicate hint and the game not given away' D.J. Taylor, Spectator

'Stunning ... evocatively brings to life the stifling humidity and constant rainfall of the Congo' John Cooper, The Times