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
THE FUTURE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. It's expected to be an excursion like any other. There is nothing in the records to indicate that anything out of the ordinary will happen. A bus will take them to the mall. They will have an hour or so to look around. Perhaps buy something, try their food. A minor traffic incident on the way back to the resort will provide additional interest - but the tour rep has no reason to expect any trouble. Until he notices that one of his party is missing. Most disturbingly, she is a woman who, according to the records, did not go missing. Now she is a woman whose disappearance could change the world. With breathtaking plot twists that ricochet through time, The Tourist is the most original conspiracy thriller you will read this year.
Robert Dickinson lives in Brighton and his life to date has been shockingly uneventful. His two previous novels were published by a small press. The Tourist is his third novel.
