Jeff Noon

A brilliantly innovative and highly entertaining novel from a literary pioneer. Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind. This edition also includes three additional short stories by Noon.

In a distant, tattered future an old woman, a young girl and mechanical man embark on a slow voyage in the shadow of the great dragon Haakenur up the vast estuary towards the city of Ludwich… Past plants on the mud-flats that send up brief, man-shaped clouds of seeds to lure you out, past shanty towns full of old sailors and pilots scraping a living from the dregs of the passenger trade, between the wicker effigies in the Wodwo graveyards this is a journey at once familiar from folk tales and country customs and utterly strange and alien. Cady, back on her boat and feeling every day of her 1,600 years; the tight-lipped but beautiful little girl and her rubber-stitched-faced, mechanical companion are an odd but warmly imagined and compelling cast to accompany the reader on a quest into a world of mysteries and terrors that leave the reader with an inkling that this world is perhaps more familiar than it first appears. Can Cady find her youth again?