First published 2013
Tibor Tarent comes back to Britain after insurgents kill his wife Melanie in Anatolia. His homeland bears scars from a catastrophic terrorist strike that obliterated a massive triangle of west London, erasing hundreds of thousands of lives in an instant. Government officials suspect links between this attack and Melanie's murder. The story weaves through multiple timelines. During World War I, a stage magician travels to the Western Front with orders to make British planes invisible to enemy forces. In 1943, a Polish woman pilot shares her harrowing escape from Nazi occupation with a young RAF technician, explaining her urgent mission to return home. In contemporary England, a physicist conducts experiments in his garden that produce the first adjacency. These interconnected narratives blur the boundaries between what appears real and what might be illusion, creating a world where every account of events becomes questionable.
Genres: science-fiction, historical-fiction, mystery, alternate-history
Vibes: atmospheric, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: time-travel, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Anatolia, Britain, London, Western Front
Period: World War I, 1943, Contemporary
432 pages · ebook · Gollancz
Content warnings: violence