Germany, spring 1946. The Nuremberg Trials are underway. Three hundred miles north, in the Rehstadt Institute, a British "Assessment and Evaluation" centre, Alex Foster interrogates a succession of lesser war criminals, exploring their pasts and their crimes, and deciding their futures in the soon-to-be-reborn Germany.

But Rehstadt, a town largely untouched by the war, is a place of old hostilities and burnished hatreds; a place still not entirely at peace; a place where the certainties of the past are still weighed favourably against the deprivations of the present and the vague, uncertain promises of the future.

As spring progresses, and as events in the wider world quicken to their own closely observed conclusion, Alex Foster finds himself at the centre of a conflict involving British, American and German interests; and for the first time in his career he also finds himself compromised - forced into subterfuge and deceit as he struggles to weigh personal convictions and loyalties against the greater political and military good...

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels includeWinter Garden(1985 James Tait Black Prize winner),A New Ice Age(1986 runner-up for the 1986 Guardian Fiction Prize),A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen(shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award),Peacetime(longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002) andGathering the Water(longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006). His latest novel,In Zodiac Light, is now available from Doubleday.

The astonishing new novel from one of the UK's finest literary writers>