Shortlisted for British Book Awards: Newcomer of the Year 2007.

'A novel of fate and free will, forensic detection and blind love, crime and its justifications. The Atmosphere crackles, but beneath al;l is a sly sense of humour. The plotting is second to non -- a finely tuned yet extravagantly complex piece of clockwork' -- Evening Standard 'An unadulterated pleasure! In prose as flamboyant as a bespoke smoking jacket, Cox's metropolis comes to life, teeming with hearty whores and weasily clerks! Cox skilfully brings a modern sensibility to his 19th-century opus!Cox's epic is as thrilling as a Hansom cab chase and as guilty a pleasure as a nocturnal turn at a gentleman's "introducing house"' -- Independent on Sunday 'Impressively fluent first novel' -- Sunday Telegraph 'Like Charles Palliser, Michel Faber and Sarah Waters, Cox is making the Victorian era a switchback ride for the reader's mind! a rich and complicated tale ! a journey into darkness' -- Independent 'Unusual and remarkable! Key to the convincing nature of this confession is Cox's grasp of the minutiae of the times and the language of the period, so that the reader at times forgets this isn't a contemporary of Dickens' -- South China Sunday Morning Post 'A brooding, sinister work. Bedecked in all the literary adornments of the period, it seeps with questions about the nature of good and evil, fate, inheritance, love and, above all, faith' -- Fiona Atherton, Scotsman

Michael Cox has been planning and drafting 'The Meaning of Night' for thirty years. He is a former editor at Oxford University Press and biographer of the ghost story writer M. R. James. His lifelong passion for Victorian literature led him to edit a number of collections of short fiction from the period, including 'The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories'. He lives in rural Northamptonshire -- where 'The Meaning of Night' is partly set -- with his wife. This is his first novel.