From the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World - a new riveting action spy thriller, blistering gangster noir, and howling absurdist comedy: a propulsively entertaining tale about a mobster's son and a retired secret agent who are forced to team up to save the world.
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Tim Martin
“500 pages of chases, subterfuges and double-crosses that sometimes resemble Count of Monte Cristo-era Dumas seen through the prism of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen … a far better structured piece of work than Harkaway’s debut, which took a similarly exuberant approach to mashing together genre tropes in its post-apocalyptic world. ”
06/03/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
David Barnett
“The plot is a jigsaw of pulpish tropes: there are enigmatic hooded monks; female superspies; devilish machines; London gangsters; an underground (both figuratively and geographically) criminal society operating with its own morality; and the small matter of a doomsday device involving lots and lots of tiny mechanical bees, and which Joe's tinkering unwittingly sets into motion. But Angelmaker is a magnificent, literary, post-pulp triumph. Harkaway is something like a great big Labrador, bouncing up and down in front of you, demanding "Look at this! Look at this!", until you are infected with his joyous enthusiasm for, well, for everything.”
04/03/2012
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The Observer
James Purdon
“On it goes, beyond summarisation, making Don Quixote look sedentary. The octogenarian lady spy and the secret military prison, the serial killer and the guild of undertakers, the bumptious civil servants and the chairman of the Royal and Ancient..… A stingier novelist could find material here for a decade's output, but Harkaway is anything but stingy. The miracle is that it all hangs together so well.”
12/02/2012
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Scotland on Sunday
Stuart Kelly
“NICK Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World, was a deliriously fun book ... In fact, it 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.”
06/02/2012
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The Independent
Roz Kaveney
“Harkaway's brilliance in this novel of adventure, love and intrigue is that he enjoys these stories and makes us remember how much we enjoy them. There is the stuff of nightmares here, but told in a light-hearted way that makes the reader grin with pleasure. It is also a fascinated homage not only to the pulp fiction of the past but also to a lost alternate England of craftsmanship: fast steam trains and back-room boffins whose gadgets beat fascism.”
07/03/2012
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The Guardian
Patrick Ness
“If Angelmaker perhaps starts a bit slowly, and you have to agree to be cheerfully confused by the plot for a good while before it starts making sense, then those are small concerns. Once it gets going, it's brilliantly entertaining, and the last hundred pages are pure, unhinged delight. What a splendid ride.”
08/02/2012
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The Times
Kate Saunders
“Harkaway has created a wonderfully entertaining, unguessable kaleidoscope of a novel.”
28/01/2012
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The Daily Mail
Harry Ritchie
“A wildly, irrepressibly exuberant new-weird/ fantasy/ thriller /comedy. ”
01/03/2012
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The Sunday Times
Alison Flood
“Sentences such as this — “Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache that tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the windowsill of the aged mother of a renowned murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life” — are in short supply in the world of literature these days. Effervescent, clever and entirely fantastic.”
25/03/2012
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