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The Whispering Swarm

  • Author
    • Michael Moorcock
Format
Regular price £10.99
Regular price Sale price £10.99

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  • Published: Jun 09 2016
  • Pages: 480
  • 198 x 128mm
  • ISBN: 9781473213333
With his first full novel in almost ten years (not counting his Doctor Who book), Michael Moorcock - the most influential figure in modern fantasy and science fiction - returns to the city of his birth. London has always been a central character in Moorcock's work, from the high-literary fiction of MOTHER LONDON to the roof gardens of Jerry Cornelius.

Now return to London just after the war, a city desperately trying to get back on its feet. And one young boy, Michael Moorcock, who is about to discover a world of magic and wonder. Between his first tentative approaches to adulthood - a job on Fleet Street, the first stirrings of his interest in writing - and a chance encounter with a mysterious Carmelite Friar, we see a version of Moorcock's life that is simultaneously a biography and a story. Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians, this is Moorcock at his dazzling, mercurial best.
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Press Reviews

  • Literary Review
    displaying as it does the full spectrum of Moorcock's idiosyncratic qualities...fusing the literary approach of MOTHER LONDON with the generic fun of his earlier work
  • The Times
    Fizzes with idea and layers of meaning that transcend the comic-book plot. Bring on part two
  • SFX
    Whispering Swarm is fantastically entertaining...Welcome back Mr Moorcock; nobody else quite has your style
  • The Spectator
    inexhaustibly inventive...welcome back Michael
  • Sci-Fi Now
    Beautifully written and wonderfully descriptive
  • The Financial Times
    [in THE WHISPERING SWARM] the capital becomes a character, much as it did in Moorcock's 1988 masterpiece MOTHER LONDON
  • The Guardian
    a discursive book, with as many meditations of marriage, metaphysics, religion and science as there are rollicking sword fights
  • The Sunday Telegraph
    merging autobiography and fantasy may not appeal to everyone...but I think it comes off because so much of a writer's life is conducted in his head and in books - his own, and other peoples...the whispering swarm is the contact internal murmuring made from books which demand to be made
  • The Daily Mail
    Odd and compelling, rambling and intense, Moorcock guides us through the byways of his extraordinary mind and explores the sources of his fiction
  • The Observer
    The resulting tale is enough to make you wish all writers would garland their memoirs with highway men and cavaliers and roundheads