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