The long-awaited first volume in a new series by Britain's master of fantasy is a strange beast indeed. Strongly autobiographical and a hall of mirrors reflecting Moorcock's own life and literary circles, it is also the tale of an apocryphal area of London, the Alsacia with at its heart a medieval Carmelite monastery, where time runs differently and characters from various periods of history as well as from the realms of popular fiction, coexist in in an unstable equilibrium, into which a callow tyro writer and journalist called Michael Moorcock ventures. Highwaymen, musketeers, roundheads, swordsmen and women, the cosmic balance between chaos and equilibrium: all Moorcock's idiosyncratic obsessions merge in a thrilling stew which blends pure adventure, myth and existential questioning. Where the next volume will take us is anyone's guess but, in the meantime, this is something quite unique. ~ Maxim Jakubowski
With his first full novel in almost ten years (not counting his Doctor Who book), Michael Moorcock - the most influential figure in modern fantasy and science fiction - returns to the city of his birth. London has always been a central character in Moorcock's work, from the high-literary fiction of MOTHER LONDON to the roof gardens of Jerry Cornelius.
Now return to London just after the war, a city desperately trying to get back on its feet. And one young boy, Michael Moorcock, who is about to discover a world of magic and wonder. Between his first tentative approaches to adulthood - a job on Fleet Street, the first stirrings of his interest in writing - and a chance encounter with a mysterious Carmelite Friar, we see a version of Moorcock's life that is simultaneously a biography and a story. Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians, this is Moorcock at his dazzling, mercurial best.
