Kirjahaku

A disparate cast of characters are drawn together under the gaze of a mysterious mystic as they try their best to survive in the new contemporary capital, a city of changing rules, privatised streets, gig economies, fractured traditions. As the heat beats down upon them, day after day, they each attempt differing strategies to maintain their place, to protect their futures and somehow to forge a way through the challenge of the day. And in the background is the story of Lily Cadyman, maid to Thomas Farriner, whose bakery in Pudding Lane was the source of the first flames which caused the Great Fire of 1666. Like Fire Unbound is a novel about survival, where the city itself emerges as a character alongside all the others: essentially democratic, an egalitarian character like our cast who struggle to maintain their integrity in the early years of the twenty first century.

What happens when the world intrudes on one man's solitude beside a wild, unforgiving sea? Meet Sam: the last good man on earth. A man has lived on his own beside the sea for many years. From a choice made long ago, he keeps himself separate from the world of people, and is completely at one with his environment. His solitude is broken by the discovery, one early morning on the flat sands of a low tide, of a child washed up on the beach. Somehow, she is still alive. In the village, a woman reflects on a lifelong fascination with an ancient love story as she faces an unknown future. The new arrival on the beach sets in chain a sequence of events that no one can alter, and in this mystical and powerful novel, we witness a man experiencing our world as though for the first time. Discover Sam, the last good man on earth.