The Adjacent
Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee 2014.
A superb literary SF novel of alternate pasts and futures from the author of the ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD-winning THE SEPARATION and the BSFA AWARD-winning THE ISLANDERS.
A photographer returns to a near-future Britain after the death of his wife in a terrorist incident in Afghanistan. And finds that the IRGB has, itself, been suffering terrorist attacks. But no-one knows quite what is happening or how. Just that there are similarities between what killed the photographer's wife and what happened in West London. Soon he is drawn into a hall of mirrors at the heart of government.
In the First World War a magician is asked to travel to the frontline to help a naval aerial reconnaissance unit hide its planes from the German guns. On the way to France he meets a certain H.G. Wells.
In the Second World War on the airfields of Bomber Commands there is also an obsession with camouflage, with misdirection. With deceit.
And in a garden, an old man raises a conch shell to his ear and initiates the first Adjacency.
Christopher Priest
Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968.
He has published thirteen novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children's non-fiction.
His novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. In 1996 Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. He has been nominated four times for the Hugo award. He has won several awards abroad, including the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Ditmar Award (Australia), and Le Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire (France). In 2001 he was awarded the Prix Utopia (France) for lifetime achievement.