A breakthrough book by a relatively new British science fiction author, THE TOURIST is a time-travel tale with a difference and features a complex, layered plot and engineered structure that might take some time for the reader to get to grips with but ultimately more than rewards him. Time travel is now possible and the principal character is a tour guide for excursions into the past who, on an a routine assignment to a pre-cataclysm London, inadvertently loses one of his tourists who then turns out to be a key factor in a chain of conspiracies and threats to the nature of the future. Multi-layered, with the tale told through two different voices (or are there actually more?), we get a glimpse of a far future where city states and a class-based society dominate, a near future on the brink of an unexplained catastrophe and a slew of timeline loops that will have you scratching your head with perplexity. If science fiction is expected to have you thinking in overdrive, this certainly does the job. ~ Maxim Jakubowski
