JERUSALEM 2018 Edition

"Jerusalem slips in and out of time, embracing Charlemagne, Einstein and Thomas Becket. You’ll emerge dazed — and dazzled by its brilliance." –– The Spectator


In decaying Northampton, eternity loiters between housing projects. Among saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a timeline unravels: second-century fiends wait in urine-scented stairwells, delinquent spectres undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours, labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts singing hymns of wealth and poverty. They celebrate the English language, challenge mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon their slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its breadth, Jerusalem is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.


“Brilliant…monumentally ambitious…Moore keeps lobbing treats to urge his readers onward: luscious turns of phrase, unexpected callbacks and internal links, philosophical digressions, Dad jokes, fantastical inventions…Behind all the formalism and eccentric virtuosity, there’s personal history from a writer who has rarely put himself into his own fiction before.” — Douglas Wolk, New York Times Book Review