The edge of the crowd - Ross Gilfillan

The Edge of the Crowd is the gripping story of early days of photography and the search for lost love in Victorian London . RUNNER UP OF THE 2002 ENCORE PRIZE.

London, 1851. Among the teeming crowds visiting the Great Exhibition is the newspaper columnist Henry Hilditch, whose sensational exposs of the lives and deprivations of the working class are the talk of bourgeois London.

But Hilditch has another agenda. Mary Medworth, the love he lost the previous summer in Florence, has reappeared somewhere in the slums of London's East End. Hilditch follows the trail from the splendour of Hyde Park to the squalor of Whitechapel, encountering thieves, gaolers, kidnappers and false friends who may well lead him to his own destruction.

The photographer Cornelius Touchfarthing is Hilditch's last link to Mary. But Touchfarthing is preoccupied with his own ambition - to create an image so astonishing it will elevate the trade of photography into High Art.

Ross Gilfillan's second novel is a thrilling recreation of Victorian London and a moving story of love, science and photography.