Ник Харкуэй: Angelmaker

“Harkaway keeps us guessing, traveling the edges between fantasy, sci-fi, the detective novel, pomo fiction and a good old-fashioned comedy of the sort that Jerome K. Jerome might have written had he had a ticking thingy instead of a boat as his prop…. His tale stands comparison to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 .”

“A puzzle box of a novel as fascinating as the clockwork bees it contains, filled with intrigue, espionage and creative use of trains. As if that were not enough to win my literary affection, Harkaway went and gave me a raging crush on a fictional lawyer.”

“You are in for a treat, sort of like Dickens meets Mervyn Peake in a modern Mother London. The very best sort of odd.”

“Nick Harkaway’s novel is like a fractal: when examined at any scale, it reveals itself to be complex, fine-structured and ornately beautiful. And just like a fractal, all of this complexity and beauty derives from a powerful and elegant underlying idea.”

“This brilliant, boundless mad genius of a book runs on its own frenetic energy, and bursts with infinite wit, inventive ambition and damn fine storytelling. You finish reading it in gape-mouthed awe and breathless admiration, having experienced something very special indeed.”

“A joyously sprawling, elaborately plotted, endlessly entertaining novel filled with adventure, comedy, espionage, and romance, Angelmaker also deals with intriguing questions of free will and the nature of truth without stopping to take a breath. As if the book is made of clockwork, the pages turn themselves.”

“A magnificent, literary, post-pulp triumph…. Angelmaker is an entertaining tour-de-force that demands to be adored.”

“An ambitious, crowded, restless caper, cleverly told and utterly immune to précis…. A solid work of modern fantasy fiction.”

“ Angelmaker is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in ages…. A joyful display of reckless, delightful invention, on a par with the rocket-powered novels of Neal Stephenson, if in rather more ironically diffident English form. Ideas come zinging in from all corners, and do so with linguistic verve and tremendous humour…. Once it gets going, it’s brilliantly entertaining, and the last hundred pages are pure, unhinged delight. What a splendid ride.”

“[ The Gone-Away World ] was a work of such glorious, exhaustive excess a part of me wondered if Harkaway would actually write again. I am profoundly glad that he has: Angelmaker is every bit as entertaining and imaginative…. Effervescent and witty…. Harkaway manages the ideal blend of paying homage to a very British sense of decency and fair play, while at the same time idolising the rule-breakers.”

“[Harkaway is] a rare kind of writer…. There is something elegantly nostalgic about Angelmaker , whether in the derring-do adventure of it, or the loving invocations of artisanship…. [Yet] it’s a gleefully post-modern book in its weaving together of genres with imagery from comic books, film and TV, and its richly imagined setting of a London with underground passages and secret markets.”

This Is a Borzoi Book

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright © 2012 by Nick Harkaway

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britain by William Heinemann, a division of Random House Group Ltd., London.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harkaway, Nick, [date]

Angelmaker / by Nick Harkaway.—1st American ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-59597-3

1. Clocks and watches—Repairing—Fiction. 2. Children of gangsters—England—London—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Older women—Fiction. 5. End of the world—Fiction. 6. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6108.A737A54 2012

823′.92—dc23 2011028261

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket design by Jason Booher

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