Edge of the Orison

In Edge of the Orison the visionary Iain Sinclair walks in the steps of poet John Clare

In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead ...

In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clares walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclairs quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poets muse.

Brilliant . . . amusing, alarming and poignant. An elegy for an already lost English landscape. Magnificent and urgentRobert Macfarlane, Times Literary Supplement

A sensitive,beautifully rendered portrait . . . a feast, a riddle, a slowly unravelling conundrum . . . a love-letter to British RomanticismIndependent

Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psychogeographies, pacing out huge word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an empty plainJ. G. Ballard, Observer

Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landors Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinskys Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters;London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.