About the Book
Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee 2014.
A superb literary SF novel of alternate pasts and futures from the author of the ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD-winning THE SEPARATION and the BSFA AWARD-winning THE ISLANDERS.
A photographer returns to a near-future Britain after the death of his wife in a terrorist incident in Afghanistan. And finds that the IRGB has, itself, been suffering terrorist attacks. But no-one knows quite what is happening or how. Just that there are similarities between what killed the photographer's wife and what happened in West London. Soon he is drawn into a hall of mirrors at the heart of government.
In the First World War a magician is asked to travel to the frontline to help a naval aerial reconnaissance unit hide its planes from the German guns. On the way to France he meets a certain H.G. Wells.
In the Second World War on the airfields of Bomber Commands there is also an obsession with camouflage, with misdirection. With deceit.
And in a garden, an old man raises a conch shell to his ear and initiates the first Adjacency.
