Red Smoking Mirror

Description

'With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' - Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender

The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.

For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma's breathtaking capital, assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea...

A bravura reimagining of an alternate history, Red Smoking Mirror is a richly written novel of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash, and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.

Reviews

'A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was' - Guardian
'Full of shadowy secrets, cloak-and-dagger politics and intimate betrayals' - Financial Times
'With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' - Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
'Like a haiku a couple of hundred pages long, Red Smoking Mirror is taut, poised and powerful. There's not a spare word. Every inflection counts. Hunt has produced something truly special; a novel that both broods and races, and which tells us vital, troubling and hopeful things about ourselves' - Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild
'A vivid, richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity, both in its detail and in its emotional impact' - Cynan Jones, author of Cove

Author description

Nick Hunt has written a trilogy of books about walking in Europe - Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water - two of which were shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His articles have appeared in the Guardian, Emergence, Resurgence & Ecologist, New Internationalist, Geographical and numerous other publications, and he works as co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. Red Smoking Mirror is his first novel.