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  • Published: 24 September 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787334298
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $55.00

Prophet

'Fabulous...a page-turner' Neil Gaiman




Daring, surprising and superbly plotted, this is a fresh, thrilling page-turner from a dynamic new duo in genre fiction

YOUR HAPPIEST MEMORY IS THEIR DEADLIEST WEAPON.

‘Fabulous... Present-day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel’
NEIL GAIMAN, author of Coraline

This is Prophet. It knows when you were happiest. It gives life to your fondest memories and uses them to destroy you...

An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. And the deaths quickly follow. A weapon like no other - Prophet - is targeting innocent people. But nobody knows who created it, or why.

Sunil Rao seems a surprising choice of investigator. Chaotic and unpredictable, the former agent is the antithesis of his partner Lieutenant Colonel Adam Rubenstein, the model of a military man. But Sunil has the unique ability to distinguish truth from lies in objects, words and people, in the past and in real time. And Adam is the only one who truly knows him, after a troubled past together. Now, as they battle this strange new reality, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear.

Prophet can weaponise the past. But only love will protect the future.

Prophet is a blast’
SUNDAY TIMES

‘A thrilling dystopian novel’
TIME

***A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR***

  • Published: 24 September 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787334298
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $55.00

About the authors

Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Her book H is for Hawk won many prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Book of the Year, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France, and in the US was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and lives in Suffolk.

Sin Blache

Sin Blaché (she/they) is a Black Irish musician and author. They have been writing horror and sci-fi stories all their life, only recently finding a vulnerable freedom in non-fiction essay writing. Prophet is her first novel. She lives in the North West of Ireland and can be found obsessing over obscure folk instruments, becoming a reluctant saviour to feral cats, and playing too many video games.

Praise for Prophet

Prophet is a wildly fun, inventive, funny, and terrifying book, with a superb mystery that gets ever more compelling and weird and, horrifyingly, familiar. This book finds the nightmare in the comforting lies we tell ourselves about our pasts, and how they inform our present

Phil Klay, author of Missionaries

A genre-blending SF fantasy thriller about the weaponisation of nostalgia

Guardian, *Books to Look Out for in 2023*

A hyperkinetic headrush of a novel that proves its organic bona fides by getting you drunk with ideas before casually and cataclysmically breaking your heart

Paraic O’Donnell, author of The Maker of Swans

Prophet promises to bring back everything you lost and now yearn for... Proper science fiction - self-aware, funny, ruthlessly propulsive, full of invention... I loved it

M. John Harrison, author of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Prophet is a crackling, shape-shifting romp with big ideas and a bigger heart. Blaché and Macdonald take a no-holds-barred approach to manifesting the ways in which individual desires are exploited by the systems we live under, and ask the necessary question of whether escape from that cycle is possible. This is a display of sheer inventiveness, and a delight

C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold

Bold, brilliant. Prophet is hypnotically enthralling, frightening, fearless, funny and full of heart. I loved it

Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End

A thrilling dystopian novel

TIME

Prophet is a page-turner in which object-oriented philosophy sits comfortably alongside military acronyms - and with a handful of familiar horror tropes to boot

Telegraph

Prophet is a blast

Sunday Times

Prophet is an electrifying, high-concept fusion of queer science-fiction and espionage thriller that is entrancing, exciting and original

Attitude

There's no denying the strength of Blanche and MacDonald's prose, and the book's very timely themes

SFX

You are in for a treat... If you like such shows as Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Lost you will no doubt like this. There is even a little wink at The X-Files... Entertaining, erudite and eerie

Scotsman

A trippy, philosophical science-fiction novel with the pacing of a thriller and the pulse of a romance

Observer

A fast-paced techno thriller... High-octane... The novel is immense fun, a work of exceptional storytelling skill and stylistic panache

Guardian

Entertaining, erudite and eerie

Scotland on Sunday

Prophet is a sui generis and rather wonderful collaboration between Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché

New York Times

An ambitious first novel from this duo — I can’t wait to see what they come up with next

Wall Street Journal

Fresh... A surprising and unexpected blend of surreal science fiction, action thriller and slow-burn queer romance, character-driven with a depth rarely encounter in SFF. Highly recommended

Locus

Skilfully constructed, its authors deploying the grammar of science fiction with ease and achieving moments of grim humour as well as horror

Times Literary Supplement

Absorbing, fast-paced and febrile, Prophet takes you through the world at an angle, exposing cracks in the reality we think we inhabit. An exhilarating and surprisingly tender trip

G. Willow Wilson, author of Alif the Unseen

At its heart Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s tightly wound (yet somehow tender?) mystery-sci-fi-thriller is a philosophical novel… What is life without mystery? And at what point does nostalgia grow so strong it derails our lives?

Literary Hub, *Best Books of Summer 2023*

A madcap sci-fi romp, which combines a bananas plot with some very touching writing on grief, nostalgia and love

New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Fabulous… It’s present-day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel with real people you can care about. And it’s a page-turner

Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline

You are in for a treat… If you like shows such as Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Lost you will no doubt like this

Scotsman