The Book of All Hours

2 primary works

Vellum

by Hal Duncan

Published 5 August 2005

It's 2017 and the End Days are coming, beings that were once human gathering to fight in one last great war for control of the Vellum -- the vast realm of eternity on which our world is just a scratch. But to a draft-dodging Irish angel and a trailer-trash tomboy called Phreedom, it's about to become brutally clear that there's no great divine or diabolic plan at play here, just a vicious battle between the hawks of Heaven and Hell, with humanity stuck in the middle, and where the easy rhetoric of Good and Evil, Order versus Chaos just doesn't apply. Here there are no heroes, no darlings of destiny struggling to save the day, and there are no villains, no dark lords of evil out to destroy the world. Or at least if there are, it's not quite clear which is which. Here, the most ancient gods and the most modern humans are equally fate's fools, victims of their own hubris, struggling to save their own skins, their own souls, but sometimes ...just sometimes ...sacrificing everything in the name of humanity. "Vellum is a mind-blowing read that's genuinely like nothing you've ever read before...The imaginary worlds that he dreams up are stunning...Vellum has expanded fantasy's limits like nothing published in years.
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Ink

by Hal Duncan

Published 2 February 2007

It's twenty years since the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and the bitmites took reality apart, twenty years since Phreedom Messenger disappeared into the wilderness and Seamus Finnan was imprisoned in his own past. Twenty years of chaos but the Dukes, the remnants of the Covenant, still cling to power in their enclaves of order in the bitmite-devastated wilderness . . . in their Havens in the Hinter.

Across the folds of time and space, though, rogues and rebels are rising up against the Empire. From a mediaeval fortress where wandering mummers stage a Harlequin play based on Euripides's The Bacchae and performed in the Cant ... to Kentigern where another Harlequin, Jack Flash, wreaks havoc on a fascist state that thought him dead. From a 1939 Paris where Jack Carter and Seamus Finnan, heroes of the International Brigades, seek to rewrite history -- to a 1929 Berlin where a very different Jack seeks to save the world from a history he has helped make real. Locked in an eternal battle of chaos and order, it seems everyone must play their part now, as rebel or tyrant, hero or villain.

`It is, quite simply, stunning and the most powerful debut novel I've read since Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell ' -- Forbidden Planet International