Edwin Ingleby walks along Murderer's Cross Road on his first day at St. Luke's, his young mind churning with fear of a bully named Griffin. This is Brett Young's great subject: the quiet terror of childhood, the way the world arranges itself around a boy's anxieties and longings. Edwin is imaginative, sensitive, prone to daydreaming, a boy who feels everything more keenly than his surroundings allow. The novel follows him from the hierarchies of public school into the rigors of medical training at North Bromwich's new university, tracing how a young man is shaped by the people he meets, the places he passes through, and the expectations of a mother ambitious for her son and a father whose Somerset blood runs steadier than Edwin knows himself to be. Brett Young writes with gentle tolerance about the formation of character, the class dynamics of Edwardian England, and the arc of a city transforming itself around the young doctor in its midst. The Great War looms, as it did over all of England in 1914, but this is not a novel about war, it is about the small cruelties and kindnesses that make a man before he ever reaches the battlefield. For readers who savor the quiet depths of early 20th-century English fiction, where atmosphere and inner life matter more than plot.
