Red Smoking Mirror
'The love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' Joanna Pocock
Published on 6. July 2023
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-1-80075-321-1 (ISBN)
Description
'With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' - Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
Shortlisted in the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards for the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place
'A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was' - Guardian
The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma's breathtaking capital. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea...
'Highly original' - Irish Times
Shortlisted in the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards for the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place
'A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was' - Guardian
The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma's breathtaking capital. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea...
'Highly original' - Irish Times
Reviews / Votes
'A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was' - Guardian 'Full of shadowy secrets, cloak-and-dagger politics and intimate betrayals' - Financial Times 'With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' - Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender 'Like a haiku a couple of hundred pages long, Red Smoking Mirror is taut, poised and powerful. There's not a spare word. Every inflection counts. Hunt has produced something truly special; a novel that both broods and races, and which tells us vital, troubling and hopeful things about ourselves' - Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild 'A vivid, richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity, both in its detail and in its emotional impact' - Cynan Jones, author of Cove 'Nick Hunt deftly pulls off a delicately embroidered tale of what so easily might have been ... A feast of language and imagination, briming with very real detail and insight' - Benedict Allen, author of Explorer 'A novel of great originality, humanity, and quest' - Dan Richards, author of Outpost 'The reader wanders through Hunt's richly imagined Tenochtitlan in a beautiful stupor ... A distinguished travel writer, Hunt enlivens his city with the sorts of passing details that make a place concrete ... brilliant' - Michael La Pointe, TLS Praise for Nick Hunt:'Travel writing in excelsis' - Jan Morris
'Nick Hunt has written a glorious book, rich with insight and wit, about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe' - Robert Macfarlane
'A thrilling and gorgeous tale, packed with meteorological wonder' - Amy Liptrot
'A beautiful, disquieting book' - William Atkins
'Nick Hunt's bold exploration of our hidden continent makes you fall in wonder with the Earth again. Passionate, learned, surprising and revelatory, this is a journey for our times' - Kapka Kassabova 'Unusual, highly original debut novel that will hopefully not prove his only venture into fiction' - The New European
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-80075-321-1 (9781800753211)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2023
Swift Press
€9.59
Available for download
Person
Nick Hunt has written a trilogy of books about walking in Europe - Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water - two of which were shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His articles have appeared in the Guardian, Emergence, Resurgence & Ecologist, New Internationalist, Geographical ?and numerous other publications, and he works as co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. Red Smoking Mirror is his first novel.