You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A rollicking romp of a spy thriller from the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World. • "A head-spinning cliffhanger that reads a bit like Harry Potter for grownups…. It would be a shame if no movie were made from this glorious piece of kaleidoscope-fiction." —The Wall Street Journal Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father’s legacy as one of London’s flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday...
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Gnomon is an extraordinary novel, and one I can’t stop thinking about some weeks after I read it. It is deeply troubling, magnificently strange, and an exhilarating read.' Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven 'Nick Harkaway’s most ambitious novel yet. [A] story of near-future mass surveillance, artificial intelligence and human identity ... An amazing and quite unforgettable piece of fiction.' Guardian 'Harkaway dazzles.' Daily Mail 'Wonderfully good.' Sunday Times Near-future Britain is a state in which citizens are constantly observed and democracy has reached a pinnacle of 'transparency.' Every action is seen, every word is recorded and the Syst...
The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it's on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out - but there's more to the fire, and the Pipe itself, than meets the eye. The job will take Gonzo and his best friend, our narrator, back to their own beginnings and into the dark heart of the Jorgmund Company itself. Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey and Romantic Epic, The Gone-Away World is a story of - among other things - love and loss; of ninjas, pirates, politics; of curious heroism in strange and dangerous places; and of a friendship stretched beyond its limits. But it also the story of a world, not unlike our own, in desperate need of heroes - however unlikely they may seem.
'Gloriously exuberant and entertaining.' Guardian 'A funny, moving and thought-provoking tale ... It's brilliant.' Independent on Sunday Sergeant Lester Ferris is a good man in need of a rest. He’s spent a lot of his life being shot at. He has no family, he’s nearly forty, burned out and about to be retired. The island of Mancreu is the perfect place for Lester to serve out his time – and the perfect place for shady business, too, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should be a problem, because Lester’s brief is to turn a blind eye. But Lester has made a friend: a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comic-book fixation who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. As Mancreu’s small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more than just an observer. He needs him to be a hero.
The digital age. An age of isolation, warped communication, disintegrating community. Where unfiltered and unregulated information pours relentlessly into our lives, destroying what it means to be human. Or an age of marvels. Where there is a world of wonder at our fingertips. Where we can communicate across the globe, learn in the blink of an eye, pull down the barriers that divide us and move forward together. Whatever your reaction to technological culture, the speed with which our world is changing is both mesmerising and challenging. In The Blind Giant, novelist and tech blogger Nick Harkaway draws together fascinating and disparate ideas to challenge the notion that digital culture is the source of all our modern ills, while at the same time showing where the dangers are real and suggesting how they can be combated. Ultimately, the choice is ours: engage with the machines that we have created, or risk creating a world which is designed for corporations and computers rather than people. This is an essential handbook for everyone trying to be human in a digital age.
The digital age. An age of isolation, warped communication, disintegrating community. Where unfiltered and unregulated information pours relentlessly into our lives, destroying what it means to be human. Or an age of marvels. Where there is a world of wonder at our fingertips. Where we can communicate across the globe, learn in the blink of an eye, pull down the barriers that divide us and move forward together. Whatever your reaction to technological culture, the speed with which our world is changing is both mesmerising and challenging. In The Blind Giant, novelist and tech blogger Nick Harkaway draws together fascinating and disparate ideas to challenge the notion that digital culture is the source of all our modern ills, while at the same time showing where the dangers are real and suggesting how they can be combated. Ultimately, the choice is ours: engage with the machines that we have created, or risk creating a world which is designed for corporations and computers rather than people. This is an essential handbook for everyone trying to be human in a digital age.
From the author of The Gone-Away World and the forthcoming Angelmaker—an exhilarating espionage murder-mystery eShort. There has been a strange death in the quiet village of Shrewton: old Donny Caspian has lost his head. In the Copper Kettle tea rooms, Tom Rice, a junior nobody from the Treasury, puzzles over the details of the case. He has been sent by his superiors to oversee the investigation, but is he supposed to help or hinder? At the next table, octogenarian superspy Edie Banister nibbles a slice of cake and struggles not to become Miss Marple. But what is the connection between the two? Who killed Donny Caspian, and why? Taking in Rice's present and Edie's daring past, from duels on shipboard to death in back alleys, “Edie Investigates” is a superb short story from the incomparable Nick Harkaway. Also included with this short, the first chapter of Nick Harkaway's long-awaited new novel Angelmaker.
This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience...
Arc’s unique mix of fact, opinion and fiction explores the possibilities for a species that can’t seem to stop tinkering with itself. P D Smith explores the city as pleasure palace. Holly Gramazio and Kyle Munkittrick each explore the friction points between civics and play, while science fiction writer Gord Sellar wonders why arguably the most forward-looking nation on earth shows no interest in futurology. Taking a longer view, Anne Galloway & Sumit Paul-Choudhury wonder whether we’ll ever be able to talk to the animals; Regina Peldszus suggests ways of surviving the tedium of deep space; and Sonja Vesterholt & Simon Ings trace Prometheus’s horrific aliens back to the utopian designs of long-forgotten Soviet filmmaker Pavel Klushantsev. In this issue’s stories - Paul McAuley’s The Man is apparently less than human, but embodies qualities his human companions seem to have forgotten. T.D. Edge, creates a polysentient world defined entirely by relationships. Jeff VanderMeer stretches human limits far beyond the ordinary. And Nick Harkaway’s mordant comedy Attenuation skewers our love of novelty and transformation.
Time Trips is a unique and beautifully illustrated collection of Doctor Who adventures from bestselling and award-winning writers including Joanne Harris, Trudi Canavan, Nick Harkaway, A.L. Kennedy and more. Taking you from ancient Alexandria to nameless planets in the far future, these tales are at turns funny, frightening, moving and thought-provoking short stories that are bigger on the inside . Time Trips includes: The Anti-Hero (featuring the Second Doctor) by Stella Duffy Salt of the Earth (featuring the Third Doctor) by Trudi Canavan The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller (featuring the Third Doctor) by Joanne Harris The Death Pit (featuring the Fourth Doctor) by A.L. Kennedy A Handful of Stardust (featuring the Sixth Doctor) by Jake Arnott The Bog Warrior (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Cecelia Ahern Keeping Up with the Joneses (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Nick Harkaway Into the Nowhere (featuring the Eleventh Doctor) by Jenny T. Colgan.