Prophet
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4.4 • 14 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NOSTALGIA HAS NEVER BEEN MORE DEADLY
“A crackling, shape-shifting romp with big ideas and a bigger heart . . . A delight.” —C Pam Zhang
From the extraordinary minds of award-winning and New York Times–bestselling author of H Is for Hawk Helen Macdonald and first time author Sin Blaché, Prophet is their electric debut, a tantalizing adventure fusing noir, sci-fi and a slow burn queer romance—set in a universe just one perilous step from our own.
Adam Rubenstein and Sunil Rao have been reluctant partners since their Uzbekistan days. Adam is a seemingly unflappable American Intelligence officer and Rao is an ex-MI6 agent, an addict and rudderless pleasure hound, with the uncanny ability to discern the truth of things—about everyone and everything other than Adam. When an American diner turns up in a foggy field in the UK after a mysterious death, Adam and Rao are called in to investigate, setting into motion the most dangerous and otherworldly mission of their lives.
In a surreal, action-packed quest that takes Adam and Rao from secret laboratories in Colorado, to a luxury lodge in Aspen, to the remote Nevada desert, the pair begins to uncover how and why people’s fondest memories are being weaponized against them by a spooky, ever-shifting substance called Prophet. As the unlikely twosome battles this strange new reality, Prophet’s victims’ memories are materializing in increasingly bizarre forms: favorite games, beloved pets, fairground rides, each more malevolent than the next. Prophet is like no enemy Adam and Rao - or the world - have ever come up against.
A tension-shot odd-couple romance, an unflinching send-up of corporate corruption, and a genre-bending tour de force, Prophet is a triumph of storytelling by a new writing duo with a thrilling future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A drug designed by the military weaponizes people's nostalgia in this sinuous and transfixing collaboration from Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) and Blaché. After an American roadside diner magically appears outside of a U.S. air base in England, the two operatives dispatched to investigate—former MI6 agent Sunil Rao and American intelligence officer Adam Rubenstein—trace its likely origins to Lunastus-Dainsleif, a lab in Aurora, Colo., that runs the military-funded Eos Prophet program. Prophet is a wildly unpredictable pharmacologic agent that induces material approximations of fond memories—referred to as Eos Prophet Generated Objects, or EPGOs—but at a grievous cost for the user: a psychic break, and sometimes death. Rao and Rubenstein prove immune to the side effects, which makes them the perfect agents to study the drug. The novel's denouement, in which Rao, Rubenstein, and their ops team navigate a landscape booby-trapped with rogue EPGOs to rescue Lunastus's CEO, is wildly surreal with occasional flashes of dark humor, such as a Pac-Man machine that physically consumes a man who was once addicted to the game. The authors' most irresistible achievement, though, is their odd-couple pairing of the Dionysian Rao with the fastidious Rubenstein, who bicker and banter contentiously despite their fondness for each other. The well-matched authors make good on their audacious premise.
