The Great When
The fantastical first instalment of the genre-busting Long London series
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
'It does what fantasy does best which is show us something beyond our experience… this shows us something absolutely new' Susanna Clarke
'A breathless time-travelling classic. Savage, humane, comic, terrifying' Iain Sinclair
'Unmistakably Alan' John Higgs
'A beautiful riot' Guardian
'I was in the wrong London. It was horrible. I'd fallen in by accident, and it was all alive and trying to eat me.'
The year 1949, the city London.
Hapless second-hand bookseller Dennis stumbles through a city still shaking off the war. While out procuring inventory, Dennis's life changes forever when he chances upon a novel that shouldn't exist; an entirely fictional book from inside another novel.
The book hails from The Great When, a magical shadow-London, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts like Crime, Poetry and Riot are incarnated as mystical beings that stalk the streets. This discovery brings terrible danger, as the book's presence leaves the doorway open between the two Londons, and The Great When must remain a secret.
Soon Dennis finds himself in the city's occult underbelly, negotiating sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some imaginary, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. If Dennis cannot return the book and close the gate, he risks dire repercussions...
Neither London will ever be the same again.
History collides with magic in The Great When. Dark, ridiculous, propulsive, Sunday Times bestseller Alan Moore opens the gates to capital metafictional chaos in the genre-busting first instalment of the Long London series.
'Brilliant and so powerfully imaginative' Adam Curtis
'A weird book and a complete joy' Mariana Enríquez
'A masterful step from one of our very best, uncompromising storytellers' Heather Parry
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Moore (Illuminations) brings the rich detail and intricate plotting familiar to his fans to the first epic fantasy in his Long London series, set in 1949 and premised on the notion that "there might be a higher world concealed behind our own." That hidden truth is revealed to an entertainingly unprepossessing protagonist, 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, who works in a used bookstore owned by his landlady, Coffin Ada. Dennis encounters the supernatural while on a quotidian errand: he's sent to another book dealer to purchase a lot of rare Arthur Machen books, hopefully at a bargain. But the haul includes an additional title, Reverend Thomas Hampole's A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis, which, Coffin Ada reveals, is not a real book: "It's not in catalogues. It's not in libraries. Arthur fucking Machen made it up in a cough cough cough novel.... This shouldn't be here. This comes from cough cough cough somewhere else." Possessing this little piece of a parallel universe soon proves deadly dangerous, and could break down the barriers between the "real" London and the one Dennis lives in, which, it turns out, is just a shadow of the other. The worldbuilding is extraordinary and the plot is utterly gripping. Readers are sure to be sucked in.
