William Palmer
Guernsey’s Finest
Genius Friend: G B Edwards and The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
By Edward Chaney
Blue Ormer Publishing 408pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Emily Brontë, Margaret Mitchell and J D Salinger are writers who, for whatever reasons, had just one novel published in their lifetimes. They must have drawn at least some satisfaction from these single successes, but consider those unfortunates whose work was issued only after their deaths: John Kennedy Toole’s suicide followed many rejections of his A Confederacy of Dunces and G B Edwards, the subject of this new biography, died of old age before the publication of his novel, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.
Gerald Basil Edwards was born in 1899 on Guernsey. He left the island when he was called up to the army in 1917 and for the rest of his life returned only on a few family visits. It was not until he was over sixty that he began his one
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine