Michael Arditti

Gurney’s End

In Zodiac Light

By

Doubleday 368pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

In 1991, Pat Barker’s Regeneration gave fictional life to Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen during their treatment for shellshock at Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh. Now, Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light features another Great War poet, Ivor Gurney, who was incarcerated in 1922 at the far less enlightened City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford. Comparisons may be odrous but they are inevitable and, in this case, fail to work in Edric’s favour.

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