“Turner upends everything. His language is like a taut but complex tool of excavation that just keeps burrowing into deeper terrain. This guy means business.”
—Sergio de la Pava, author of A Naked Singularity and Lost Empress
New Year's Eve, 1989. At a residential care home in suburban Australia, fireworks explode in the distance while an elderly man dies in troubling circumstances. Decades later, a proof-reader, disfigured by a childhood accident, prepares to meet a celebrated and reclusive novelist. Between these two figures a subtle and intricate web is woven, implicating the members of a mystical cult, the victim of a beheading, an impostor artist, and the enigmatic presence known only as Agent Vell.
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Nicholas John Turner is based in Brisbane, Australia. This is his literary debut in North America.