The Chimes
by Anna Smaill
World Fantasy Award 2016.
The Chimes is set in a reimagined London, in a world where people cannot form new memories, and the written word has been forbidden and destroyed.
In the absence of both memory and writing is music.
In a world where the past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is blasphony, all appears lost. But Simon Wythern, a young man who arrives in London seeking the truth about what really happened to his parents, discovers he has a gift that could change all of this forever.
A stunning literary debut by poet and violinist Anna Smaill, The Chimes is a startlingly original work that combines beautiful, inventive prose with incredible imagination.
Details updated March 27, 2022
Anna Smaill
Anna Smaill lives in Wellington with her husband, novelist Carl Shuker, and her daughter. She studied performance violin at Canterbury University and creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at the University of Victoria, and has a PhD in English Literature from University College London. She is the author of one book of poetry (The Violinist in Spring, VUP 2005) and her poems have been published and anthologised in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Her first novel The Chimes will be published by Sceptre in Feburary 2015.
