Available Formats
Red Smoking Mirror
By (Author) Nick Hunt
Swift Press
Swift Press
27th August 2024
6th June 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.92
Paperback
288
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
'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.
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'A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was' - Guardian
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'Full of shadowy secrets, cloak-and-dagger politics and intimate betrayals' - Financial Times
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'With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' - Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
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'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
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'A vivid, richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity, both in its detail and in its emotional impact' - Cynan Jones, author of Cove
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Nick Hunt has written a trilogy of books about walking in Europe - Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water - two of which were shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His articles have appeared in the Guardian, Emergence, Resurgence & Ecologist, New Internationalist, Geographical and numerous other publications, and he works as co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. Red Smoking Mirror is his first novel.