The raft - Arabella Edge

Having won a Gold Medal at the prestigious Salon for his painting Charging Chasseur - completed at the tender age of twenty-one - Gericault finds himself, seven years later, distracted and lovesick due to his secret affair with his benefactor-uncle's young wife, Alexandrine, still desperately searching for the subject of his next tableau. Then, at the house of his neighbour, he hears about the French frigate Medusa, shipwrecked off the shores of the West African coast.

With tales of betrayal, madness, murder and cannibalism, this was a catastrophe that horrified the French public - and Gericault is duly fascinated. When he manages to track down two of the raft's survivors and invites them to his home to discover what really happened during those fifteen days at sea, Gericault knows he has finally found his subject.

Praise for The Company

'Pitched somewhere between Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies, this is a thoroughly diabolical tale in the best sense' Daily Mail

'We're led into the mind of a marooned madman via a lapidary, first-person prose style that speaks vividly to the senses. Nimbly balanced on a tightrope of acute intelligence and ruthless psychopathy' Time Out

'Edge is almost as good as Patrick O'Brian in her re-creation of life on a sailing ship.A second novel please. And soon' The Times