Jeff Noon

The Dust tells the story… 1968, Lancashire: It is Joe Sutter’s last summer before going to secondary school. His world is like ours but beyond and beside what we know is Greot; a vast swirling rainbow of many-coloured dust. It settles on the dead, it swathes cities and fields. Joe is one of the few who have the gift of always being able to see it. But no one knows what Greot is. Is it the trillion-eyed god? The history of everything told grain-by-grain? Prophecy? The magic of creativity? Joe can’t know; all he wants to do is draw comics and listen to music. Then one day, as the moon rises over Brendle hill, he meets an old writer of pulp SF books who is determined to pass on the power and joy of telling stories. And everything changes. Decades later Joe is a successful SF novelist, and the time has come to tell his story and about how Greot coloured everything. “Jeff Noon is one of our few true visionaries”Warren Ellis File Under: Psychedelia | Doctor Mask | Invisible Girl | Joined at the page

"Flowers in the rain, indeed. Big jump in the grain count. I can hear them jumping. This old hippy is sneezing already. Ya Ya! The flowers are spurting pollen all over the Manchester map. Gumbo never seen such a giant, golden step before." In a strange re-mixed future Manchester a cloud of Pollen descends – a new strain, each tiny grain a murderer. Within days the streets of the city are overgrown with vicious blooms as the fiercest hay fever epidemic of all time takes hold. People are sneezing themselves to death and the pollen count is racing towards 2,000. But a small percentage of the population are immune to the fever. Two of them – shadow-cop Sibyl Jones and her wayward daughter Boda – are on separate path into the dark place from where the pollen originates. What they find there will change their lives together. Only they can save the city. Bless you.

Luluda tells the story of a journey through a strange modern city whose power is sourced from the ghost of a dragon. Ludwich may no longer be at war with its great political rival overseas, but veteran sailor Cady Meade, survivor of many battles, suspects that the hard-won peace is about to break. She promises to deliver a preternatural ten-year old girl to a coming-of-age festival in the heart of Ludwich. But she has been warned by the prophets that dangers lie ahead. Cady suspects that the young girl’s fate is entwined with that of the city. When the girl disappears, the old sailor must hunt her down, accompanied by a know-it-all mechanical man whose circuits are slowly grinding to dust. But Cady’s mission has always been to guard Ludwich from enemies both known and occult, and she will never give up. Following the course of the River Nysis through the city, and beyond, Cady must uncover the final mysteries of the great dragon Haakenur's life and death and afterlife. Her greatest battle is about to begin.

Gogmagog tells the story of an epic journey through the sixty-mile long ghost of a dragon. We travel by boat, a rickety steam launch captained by Cady Meade, a veteran taxi pilot on the river Nysis. In her heyday she carried people and goods from the thriving seaports of the estuary into Ludwich, the capital city. But that was years ago. Now she’s drunk, holed up in a rundown seaside resort, telling her bawdy tales for shots of rum. All that’s about to change, when two strangers seek her out, asking for transport, one of whom – a young girl – is very ill, and in great danger. The other, an artificial being of singular character, has secrets hidden inside his crystal skull. And so begins the voyage of the Juniper. The Nysis is unlike any other river. Mysteries unfold with each port of call. Not many can navigate these channels, not many know of its whirlpools and sandbanks, and of the ravenous creatures that lurk beneath the surface. Cady used to have the necessary knowledge, and the powers of spectral navigation. But her glory days are well behind her now. This might well be her final journey. File Under: Fantasy [ Peake Fantasy | Secret Mythologies | Take Me to the River | Another London ]

Scribble and his gang, the Stash Riders, haunt the streets of an alternate Manchester, chasing the immersive highs that come from Vurt Feathers. Place a feather in your mouth and it takes you to the Vurt: another place, a trip, a shared reality of all our dreams and mythologies. Different coloured feathers provide different experiences, but Scribble is searching for his lost love and only one feather offers the hope of finding her. It’s the ultimate feather, it may not even exist at all: Curious Yellow. But as the Game Cat says, “Be careful, be very careful. This ride is not for the weak.” First published in 1993, Jeff Noon’s extraordinary, influential, award-winning novel transcended SF boundaries and resisted categorization. Alluding to noir and surrealism alike, it was defiantly its own thing and remains so thirty years later. “Refreshing, disturbing and original," – The Independent File Under: Fantasy [ Curious Yellow | Urban Wonderland | Game Cat | Living on the Dub Side ]

At first glance, Leonard Graves’ death was unremarkable. Sleeping pills, a bottle of vodka, a note saying goodbye. But when Detective Henry Hobbes discovers a grave in the basement, he realizes there is something far more sinister at work. Further investigation unearths more disturbing evidence. Scattered around the old house are women’s dresses. All made of the same material. All made in the same colours. And all featuring a rip across the stomach, smeared in blood. As the investigation continues and the body count rises, Hobbes must also deal with the disappearance of his son, the break-up of his family and a growing sense that something horrific happened in the Graves’ household. And he’s running out of time to find out what.

In the year 1960, private eye John Nyquist arrives in Delirium, a city of a million borders, to pursue his strangest case yet: tracking down Oberon, the stolen, sentient image of faded film star Vince Craven. As Nyquist tracks Oberon through a series of ever-stranger and more surreal borders, he hears tantalising stories of the Yeald, a First Wall hidden at Delirium's heart. But to get the help he needs to find it, he'll have to journey into the fractured minds of the city's residents, and even into his own... File Under: Science Fantasy [ Go Fourth | All Mad Here | Uneasy Dreams | Borderline ]

In the winter of 1959, privateeye John Nyquist arrives in the village of Hoxley-on-the-Hale with only apackage of cryptic photographs, and the frail hope of finding an answer to aquestion he's been asking since his childhood.But the villagers offer littlehelp, as each day brings a twisted new rule in the name of a different Saintthat they, and Nyquist, must follow. And there are whispers of the return ofthe Tolly Man, an avatar of chaos in a terrible mask...As Nyquist struggles todistinguish friend from foe, and the Tolly Man draws nearer, he must race to finallysettle the one mystery he has never been able to solve: the disappearance ofhis father.From the singular imagination of Jeff Noon comes this dark tale of folk horror in the Philip K. Dick Award-nominated John Nyquist series.File Under: Horror Fantasy [ Everyday Saints | Not the Ravens | Fatherland | Written in Blood ]

'Noon's storytelling is assured and compelling ... it's a belter' Guardian‘Constantly surprising’ SpectatorA viciously occult murder.A curious clue left on the body.The soundtrack to the murder still playing...It is 1981 and Detective Inspector Henry Hobbes is still reeling in the aftermath of the fire and fury of the Brixton riots. The battle lines of society - and the police force - are being redrawn on a daily basis. With the certainties of his life already sorely tested, a brutal murder will shake his beliefs to their very core once more. The manner of the death and its staged circumstances pose many questions to which there are no obvious answers. To track the murderer, Hobbes must cross boundaries into a subculture hidden beneath the everyday world he thought he knew. His investigation takes him into a twisted reality, which is both seductive and devastating, and asks him the one question he has been dreading: How far will he go in pursuit of the truth?Jeff Noon is the author of six acclaimed novels, Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice, Nymphomation, Needle in the Groove and Falling Out of Cars, as well as two collections of short fictions, and is also the crime fiction reviewer for The Spectator. He lives in Brighton.

Editor Donna Scott has selected the very best short fiction by British authors published during 2017. Twenty-two stories, from established names and rising stars of genre fiction.Introduction - Donna Scott Blinders - Tyler Keevil In the Night of the Comet - Adam Roberts The Walls of Tithonium Chasma - Tim Major 3.8 Missions - Katie Gray Over You - Jaine Fenn The Ghosts of Europa Will Keep You Trapped in a Prison You Make for Yourself - Matt Dovey Uniquo - Aliya Whiteley Looking for Laika - Laura Mauro A Good Citizen - Anne Charnock Mercury Teardrops - Jeff Noon The Nightingales in Pl tres - Natalia Theodoridou The Road to the Sea - Lavie Tidhar When I Close My Eyes - Chris Barnham Targets - Eric Brown London Calling - Philip A. Suggars The Last Word - Ken MacLeod After the Atrocity - Ian Creasey Voicemail - Karen McCreedy Green Boughs Will Cover Thee - Sarah Byrne Airless - N.J. Ramsden Product Recall - Robert Bagnall The Endling Market - E. J. Swift About the Authors.

In a city where words come to life and reality is infected by stories, private eye John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body… The dead man’s impossible whispers plunge him into a murder investigation like no other. Clues point him deeper into an unfolding story infesting its participants as reality blurs between place and genre. Only one man can hope to put it all together, enough that lives can be saved… That man is Nyquist, and he is lost. File Under: Science Fiction [ Murder He Wrote | Festival of Words | Stranger In Fiction | Odin’s Horse ]

Below the neon skies of Dayzone - where the lights never go out, and night has been banished - lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna.As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city's fate. In the end, there's only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk. File Under: Science Fiction [ A Man Out of Time | Not Alone | Like Quicksilver | Into Dusk ]

A private eye stalks a serial killer through the streets of a permanently dark world in this mind-bending sci-fi thriller from one of the genre's most visionary authors Below the neon skies of Dayzone--where the lights never go out, and night has been banished--lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna. As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city's fate. In the end, there's only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.