'WithRed Smoking Mirror,Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin'- Joanna Pocock,author ofSurrender
The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier,Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians,and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram,who led the first ships across the sea,has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma's breathtaking capital,assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely,sacrifices are increasing at the temples,a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city,and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea...
A bravura reimagining of an alternate history,Red Smoking Mirroris a richly written novel of love and fate,of how cultures co-operate and clash,and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.
Publisher: Swift PressISBN: 9781800753211Dimensions: 216 x 135 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was'- Guardian
'Full of shadowy secrets,cloak-and-dagger politics and intimate betrayals'- Financial Times
'With Red Smoking Mirror,Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin'- Joanna Pocock,author of Surrender
'Like a haiku a couple of hundred pages long,Red Smoking Mirror is taut,poised and powerful. There's not a spare word. Every inflection counts. Hunt has produced something truly special; a novel that both broods and races,and which tells us vital,troubling and hopeful things about ourselves'- Charles Foster,author of Cry of the Wild
'A vivid,richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity,both in its detail and in its emotional impact'- Cynan Jones,author of Cove
'Nick Hunt deftly pulls off a delicately embroidered tale of what so easily might have been...A feast of language and imagination,briming with very real detail and insight'- Benedict Allen,author of Explorer
'A novel of great originality,humanity,and quest'- Dan Richards,author of Outpost
'The reader wanders through Hunt's richly imagined Tenochtitlán in a beautiful stupor...A distinguished travel writer,Hunt enlivens his city with the sorts of passing details that make a place concrete...brilliant'- Michael La Pointe,TLS
Praise for Nick Hunt:
'Travel writing in excelsis'- Jan Morris
'Nick Hunt has written a glorious book,rich with insight and wit,about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe'- Robert Macfarlane
'A thrilling and gorgeous tale,packed with meteorological wonder'- Amy Liptrot
'A beautiful,disquieting book'- William Atkins
'Nick Hunt's bold exploration of our hidden continent makes you fall in wonder with the Earth again. Passionate,learned,surprising and revelatory,this is a journey for our times'- Kapka Kassabova
'Unusual,highly original debut novel that will hopefully not prove his only venture into fiction'- The New European
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