The Kingdoms
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4.7 • 13 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA GOLD CROWN
LONGLISTED FOR THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION 2021 BEST NOVEL
For fans of Matt Haig, Stuart Turton and Bridget Collins comes a sweeping historical adventure from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
'Original, joyous and horrifying, The Kingdoms is an awe-inspiring feat of imagination and passion which had me in tears by the end' - Catriona Ward
Come home, if you remember
The postcard has been held at the sorting office for ninety-one years, waiting to be delivered to Joe Tournier. On the front is a lighthouse – Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides.
Joe has never left England, never even left London. He is a British slave, one of thousands throughout the French Empire. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter.
But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember and of a world that never existed – a world where English is spoken in England, and not French.
And now he has a postcard of a lighthouse built just six months ago, that was first written nearly one hundred years ago, by a stranger who seems to know him very well.
Joe's journey to unravel the truth will take him from French-occupied London to a remote Scottish island, and back through time itself as he battles for his life – and for a very different future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulley's latest genre-bending feat (after The Lost Future of Pepperharrow) masterfully combines history, speculative fiction, queer romance, and more into an unputdownable whole. In 1898, Joe Tournier finds himself in Londres—a city in the French Republic, which colonized England in the Napoleonic Wars—without any memory of his life before that moment. All he has are hazy images that come to him in dreams and an unshakable sense that something is wrong. And he's not the only one: others in the city are feeling the same strange amnesia. When a postcard arrives for Joe bearing clues to his identity—mailed in 1805 but somehow depicting a recently built Scottish lighthouse—Joe resolves to find a way to reach that lighthouse and search for answers—but the mystery only grows more complicated from there, leading Joe down a rabbit hole that sends him from Scotland to Spain on a time-bending journey that spans more than a century. Pulley doesn't shy away from the story's sharp edges, exploring the devastating effects changes in the past can have on the future and shining a light on the ambiguous moral choices made by characters under duress. These dark, challenging moments are bolstered by the action-packed and intricate plot and leavened by the rich emotional entanglements of the makeshift family that Joe stumbles into along the way. This is a stunner.
