Nick Harkaway

The island of Mancreu is the perfect place for Lester to serve out his time â?? and the perfect place for shady business, too, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres.

The digital age.An age of isolation, warped communication, disintegrating community. Where unfiltered and unregulated information pours relentlessly into our lives, destroying what it means to be human. Or an age of marvels. Where there is a world of wonder at our fingertips. Where we can communicate across the globe, learn in the blink of an eye, pull down the barriers that divide us and move forward together.Whatever your reaction to technological culture, the speed with which our world is changing is both mesmerising and challenging.In The Blind Giant, novelist and tech blogger Nick Harkaway draws together fascinating and disparate ideas to challenge the notion that digital culture is the source of all our modern ills, while at the same time showing where the dangers are real and suggesting how they can be combated. Ultimately, the choice is ours: engage with the machines that we have created, or risk creating a world which is designed for corporations and computers rather than people. This is an essential handbook for everyone trying to be human in a digital age.

From the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World - an adventure story, a war story, and a love story, all wound into one brilliant narrative that runs like clockwork. Shortlisted for the Arthur C.

A rollicking romp of a spy thriller from the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World. - "A head-spinning cliffhanger that reads a bit like Harry Potter for grownups.... It would be a shame if no movie were made from this glorious piece of kaleidoscope-fiction." --The Wall Street Journal Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father's legacy as one of London's flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday machine. His once-quiet life is suddenly overrun by mad monks who worship John Ruskin, psychopathic serial killers, mad geniuses and dastardly villains. On the upside, he catches the eye of bright and brassy Polly, a woman with enough smarts to get anyone out of a sticky situation. In order to save the world and defeat the nefarious forces threatening it, Joe must help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago, and he must summon the courage to pick up his father's old gun and join the fight.

A hilarious, action-packed look at the apocalypse that combines a touching tale of friendship, a thrilling war story, and an all out kung-fu infused mission to save the world. "A flat-out ferociously good novel.... Reads like a surrealist smashup of Pynchon and Pratchett, Vonnegut and Heller." --Austin Chronicle Gonzo Lubitch and his best friend have been inseparable since birth. They grew up together, they studied kung-fu together, they rebelled in college together, and they fought in the Go Away War together. Now, with the world in shambles and dark, nightmarish clouds billowing over the wastelands, they have been tapped for an incredibly perilous mission. But they quickly realize that this assignment is more complex than it seems, and before it is over they will have encountered everything from mimes, ninjas, and pirates to one ultra-sinister mastermind, whose only goal is world domination.

Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out - but there's more to the fire, and the Pipe itself, than meets the eye. Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey and Romantic Epic, The Gone-Away World is a story of - among other things - love and loss;