‘A lawyer looks for the tiny rock of guilt in a sea of innocence. A lawyer looks for the tiny rock of innocence in a sea of guilt. That’s their trade.’ John Fraser has been described as ‘the most original novelist of our time’ by the Whitbread Award Winner and Book Prize nominee John Fuller. In Fraser’s latest novel, after a convulsive war that rumbles on for thirty years a disparate group search amongst the metal skeletons, detritus and urban wreckage of a shattered land for a new life, a new start and some kind of normality.

The group, comprising therapists and entrepreneurs, including the novel’s narrator - a cross between a mercenary and a pacifier - generate between them complicated and sometimes fantastic responses to the challenges facing them.

The war continues to reverberate, on an individual basis, but also in the wider context of economic recovery, religious radicalism, and commodity speculation.

Death and trauma continue, social and ideological cleavages deepen, but ultimately there is a hint that once the Thirty Years are up, the surviving characters may continue their lives back where it all began.

Thirty Years has echoes of the Thirty Years War, and of Brecht’s Mother Courage. As Fraser’s characters continue to commit crimes, financial and physical, the novel questions and reframes the essential issues of crime and punishment that have concerned humanity from the Bible and Koran, to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and onwards into the future.