This satiric literary novel is a fast-paced coming-of-age tale in a picaresque vein, set for the most part in the England of 1645, during the height of the English Civil War. The discovery of a sex crime—and a case of sexual “deviance”—brings two green youths into a collision course with the law, culminating in outlawry. Their attempt to extricate themselves backfires, setting in motion a series of comic yet dark adventures through a topsy-turvy world of legal corruption, organized crime, religious fanaticism, and war. See them shed their innocence—painfully.

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Edmund Fairfax is an author of literary fiction, with a love of satire, rich plot, and linguistic invention. The latter are prominent features in his literary novel Outlaws (2017), a fast-paced coming-of-age tale in a picaresque vein set during the English Civil War. He is keenly interested in early Germanic languages (esp. Gothic and Old English). He has had published both scholarly articles on elder-futhark runology, as well as Gothic-language translations of children’s stories. He is particularly interested in the literary use of a “constructed” form of English employing words of mainly Germanic origin, either living or resuscitated, or coinages based on the same (cf. the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the linguistic invention of William Barnes). He is also a composer of mainly vocal music (song and chamber opera) in a style that has strong ties to music before 1800. He was an early-dance consultant for the Toronto-based company Ballet Espressivo 2003-2008, and was appointed Adjunct Professor of Dance at York University (Toronto) in 2005, in recognition of his contribution to early-dance research (The Styles of Eighteenth-Century Ballet 2003).