Cannonbridge
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Flamboyant Matthew Cannonbridge was touched by genius, the most influential mind of the 19th century, a novelist, playwright, the poet of his generation. The only problem is, he should never have existed, and recently divorced 21st century don Toby Judd is the only person to realise something is wrong with history.
Cannonbridge was everywhere: he was by Lake Geneva when talk between Byron, Shelley and Mary Godwin turned to the supernatural; he was friend to the young Dickens as he laboured in the blacking factory; he was the only man of note to visit Wilde in prison. His extraordinary life spanned a century. But as the world prepares to toast the bicentenary of Cannonbridge’s most celebrated work, Judd’s discovery leads him on a breakneck chase across the English canon and countryside, to the realisation that the spectre of Matthew Cannonbridge, planted so seamlessly into the heart of the 19th century, might not be so dead and buried after all...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A giddy synthesis of Gothic horror and dystopian satire propels this vividly plotted, cinematic genre-bender. Matthew Cannonbridge was the genius of his age, "the greatest writer of the 19th century, its very spirit, its dark soul." He was prolific, charismatic, an equal intimate of Mary Shelley and Arthur Conan Doyle... and, according to beleaguered scholar Toby Judd, who lives sometime in our near future, he was a "colossal and outrageous fraud." When Toby's career-tanking lecture on the "Cannonbridge Delusion" goes viral, his life plunges into an outlandish escalation of conspiracy: a murdered policeman, a toffee-chewing killer, two secretive sisters, an ex-military waitress, a mysterious island, and the ominous question: "What's an investment bank's interest in Victorian literature?" Barnes (The Domino Men) takes the premise of a literary thriller and supercharges it with hints of science fiction and an appropriately Dickensian style, intercutting Toby's slightly futuristic world with star-studded encounters from Cannonbridge's past. Only the final twist overreaches in pursuit of unpredictability.
