City of All Seasons

(Paperback)

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A vibrant and emotional science fantasy about cousins trapped in mirrored worlds the resplendent and verdant summer city and the ice-carved wastes of the winter city. For fans of Every Heart a Doorway and This is How You Lose the Time War.

'A beautifully strange and unique fable.' The Guardian's Best SF of 2024 on Aliya Whiteley

'A unique and memorable work.' The Guardian's Best SF of 2024 on Oliver K. Langmead

'An elegantly told meditation on how we can't leave ourselves behind.' Esquire's 30 best SF Books of 2024 on Oliver K. Langmead

Welcome to Jamie Pike's Fairharbour a city stuck in perpetual winter, its windows and doorways bricked shut to keep out the freezing cold, its residents striving to survive in the arctic conditions. Welcome to Esther Pike's Fairharbour a city stuck in constant summer, its walls crumbling in the heat, its oppressive sunlight a relentless presence. Winter and Summer alike, have both fallen under the yoke of oppressive powers, that have taken control after the cataclysm. But both Fairharbours were once a single, united city. And in certain places, at certain times, one side can catch a glimpse of the other. As Jamie and Esther find a way to communicate across the divide, they set out to solve the mystery of what split their city in two, and what, if anything, might repair their fractured worlds.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR LANGMEAD

Langmead's ambitious, original fiction is always something to savour, and Calypso contains some of his very best writing. Full of arresting imagery, emotional complexity and startling narrative turns, it's a thoughtful, elegant, exciting -- a really unique read. I loved it.
Sarah Waters

Perfectly balanced between timely and timeless, Calypso challenged my perceptions of what science fiction could be. The result is nothing short of iconic. A stunning work of epic imagination and outstanding craftsmanship. Langmead stretches language and form to create beautiful verse and a sizzling story.
T.L. Huchu

Langmead stands at the cutting edge of science fiction. He has taken on the monumental task of novelty in a jaded world and succeeded admirably. His work is gutsy in both thesis and execution, and he'll absolutely be on my list of stars to watch.
Alex White

Calypso is many things. It's highly inventive, delicately crafted, and an elegant tale. It is both a written work and a work of art, using the kind of formal experiment which, when considered with the narrative, enhances the whole. I enjoyed it immensely.
Tade Thompson

Calypso is an evocative and visionary novella that reshapes the cold, scientific story of human colonisation into a lyrical song, reminiscent of ancient epic poems.
Sunyi Dean

This is very cool. The story of an interstellar colony mission rendered as an epic poem, rich with imagery and allusion. And it looks lovely. I really enjoyed this.
David Hutchinson

Far more than a literal Space Odyssey, Oliver Langmead's Calypso is a breathless high wire act of a novel. A rich, reckless, gravity-defying marvel.
Malcolm Devlin

I love everything about it. I love the structural play of it; I love that it's so beautiful, there's such wonderful language, those sections pulsing as waveforms are incredible; it's presented in such a beautiful way that I was honestly absolutely flabbergasted. It's extraordinary. It's so stylish, and powerful. And it's so absolutely, utterly assured, it totally understand itself and what it's trying to say and do. I loved it.
James Smythe

Bloody hell, it's brilliant! Seriously, I'm happy something like this exists. It's fantastic. A sense of wonder pervades every line and every chapter; the characters are memorable, warm, heartbreakingly human. Give as many people as possible a chance to go on this strange, savage journey.
Francesco Dimitri

Calypso is a brilliant, consistently amazing and utterly original piece of science fiction: intensely readable and absorbing not despite being in verse but because of it, expertly handled and thought-provoking.
Adam Roberts

Vivid, mind-bending and utterly unique, Langmead is a writer at the very forefront of genre fiction.
Stark Holborn

Carried along on the undulations of the text, you sink into the narrative, subsumed, seduced by the beauty of flora-fauna-funga body horror; the splendour of becoming more-than-human. Calypso is a stunning piece of work that made me feel as one with all the glorious magnificence and horror of the world.
Ever Dundas

PRAISE FOR WHITELEY

"Intense and consuming writing, constantly challenging expectations."
Adrian Tchaikovsky

"Whiteley's self-deconstructing quest narrative is a puzzle box full of delights, perils and strange wonders. Haunting."
Mike Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts and The Book of Koli

"Whiteley takes the reader on a cryptic journey of trust, identity and knowing your place in the world."
Starburst Magazine

"Whiteley's trademark subtle surrealism shines."
Publishers Weekly

"A melancholy and compellingly weird tale of identity in crisis."
SFX

"A unique work of literary and speculative excellence."
SciFiNow

"One of the most original and provocative voices in contemporary science fiction."
Nina Allen

"A hero's journey stripped back to its essence, remixed with spaceships and conspiracies, masquerade and menace. Is it an allegory pretending to be an adventure story An adventure masquerading as a secret history of the world A new kind of wisdom literature for the digital age Whatever it is I loved every second of it. Truly Aliya Whiteley is one of the most original and interesting writers in the field."
Helen Marshall, author of The Migration

"There's nothing like a new Aliya Whiteley novel, and no Aliya Whiteley novel is like any other. Three Eight One may be her most enigmatic work to date, a parable of maturation and the milestones of life that is at once mythical and down-to-earth. I adored every moment of it, and I found it overwhelming in its scope, honesty and emotional impact. It's certainly one of the best novels I've read this year."
Tim Major, author of You Don't Belong Here and Snakeskins

"A brain-charging voyage through the present and the future, a novel that shepherds the reader out and then brings her back in, changing her in the process. It's like Kafka rewrote Pale Fire as a science-fictional novel. A Pilgrim's Progress through a godless world where the pilgrim is Patrick McGoohan's 'Prisoner.' A dream of a book, in several senses: enigmatic, marvellous, utterly original. Whiteley really is one of the most striking and brilliant writers working today."
Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself

"Masterfully written and rich with meaning, Three Eight One confirms Aliya Whiteley as one of our most ingenious -- and important -- storytellers. Travelling the Horned Road is a wild and unique experience: funny and thoughtful, frightening and joyful. I already want to go back."
Matt Hill, author of Lamb and The Breach

"Like watching a magic trick happen... I'm going to be thinking about Three Eight One for a long time."
Fiona Barnett, author of The Dark Between the Trees

"Three Eight One celebrates the art of storytelling with every clever twist and turn in this exquisitely crafted, beautifully realized voyage of discovery."
E. J. Swift, author of The Coral Bones and Paris Adrift

"Slippery and whip-smart, this is a novel profoundly perceptive of the human condition. It has a disorienting ebb and flow - elegantly elusive and dream-like at times, while also being finely-tuned and precise. A mediation, perhaps, on the fallacies of history, and the futility of searching for meaning."
Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them and Dead Relatives

Author Bio

Oliver K. Langmead is an author and a poet based in Glasgow. His novels include Birds of Paradise and Metronome, and his long-form poem, Dark Star, featured in the Barnes and Noble and the Guardian's Best Books of 2015. Oliver is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow, where he is researching terraforming and ecological philosophy, and in late 2018 he undertook a writing residency at the European Space Agency's Astronaut Centre in Cologne, writing about astronauts and people who work with astronauts.

Aliya Whiteley's is the author of The Beauty, The Loosening Skin, Skein Island, From the Neck Up, The Arrival of Missives and more. Her novels and novellas have been shortlisted for multiple awards including the Arthur C. Clarke award, British Fantasy award, British Science Fiction award and a Shirley Jackson award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Guardian, The Dark, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Strange Horizons, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and anthologies such as This Dreaming Isle, 2084 and Lonely Planet's Better than Fiction.