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A rollicking romp of a spy thriller from the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World. • "A head-spinning cliffhanger that reads a bit like Harry Potter for grownups…. It would be a shame if no movie were made from this glorious piece of kaleidoscope-fiction." —The Wall Street Journal
Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father’s legacy as one of London’s flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday machine. His once-quiet life is suddenly overrun by mad monks who worship John Ruskin, psychopathic serial killers, mad geniuses and dastardly villains. On the upside, he catches the eye of bright and brassy Polly, a woman with enough smarts to get anyone out of a sticky situation. In order to save the world and defeat the nefarious forces threatening it, Joe must help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago, and he must summon the courage to pick up his father’s old gun and join the fight.
Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father’s legacy as one of London’s flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday machine. His once-quiet life is suddenly overrun by mad monks who worship John Ruskin, psychopathic serial killers, mad geniuses and dastardly villains. On the upside, he catches the eye of bright and brassy Polly, a woman with enough smarts to get anyone out of a sticky situation. In order to save the world and defeat the nefarious forces threatening it, Joe must help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago, and he must summon the courage to pick up his father’s old gun and join the fight.
44 Reviews
3.5
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“When I say spy/crime/mystery novel with hints of sci fi horror, let it be known I mean there are spies AND criminals AND mysteries and also truly original speculative elements. Still, I fear this description will not provide you with an adequate idea of how delightfully bonkers this book is. I do not mean that in a perjorative sense. This has to be one of my favourite madcap adventures even upon reread. The writing has some hilarious and witty moments; it also has its fair share of dark and violent moments.
There are strong themes around identity, family, and destiny, becoming your own person amidst the stories of others; what consitutes right v. wrong, especially when you tack on traditional moral and legal considerations, and modern bureaucracy and government and the suggestion of what is done in the shadows ostensibly for the greater good without oversight or citizen input; also the power of knowledge and deception, and I would argue, the danger of unconditional faith, it lands somewhere between an ode to and a cautionary tale of reverence for traditional craftsmanship.
1/?”Likable charactersOriginal writingAbuseAnimal abuseViolence
jmsreads
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Rae Reads
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William Isenberger
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Amy Kuhn
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About Nick Harkaway
NICK HARKAWAY is the author of five novels, Titanium Noir, The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, and Gnomon, as well as a nonfiction work about digital culture, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He is also a regular blogger for The Bookseller's FutureBook website. He lives in London with his wife, a human rights lawyer, and their two children.
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