The Second Sleep

FROM THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR WHAT IF YOUR FUTURE LIES IN THE PAST? 'One word- wonderful. Two words- compulsive reading. Three words- buy it tomorrow. Four words- tonight, if possible.' STEPHEN KING 'A thoroughly absorbing, page-turning narrative.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Genuinely thrilling.' DAILY TELEGRAPH Dusk is gathering as a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, rides across a silent land. He must arrive at a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor before night falls. He's lost and he's becoming anxious as he slowly picks his way across a countryside strewn with the ancient artefacts of a civilisation that seems to have ended in cataclysm. What Fairfax cannot know is that, in the days and weeks to come, everything he believes in will be tested as he uncovers a secret that is as dangerous as it is terrifying . . . ' Harris takes us on a thrilling ride while serving up serious food for thought.' SUNDAY EXPRESS 'A truly surprising future-history thriller. Fabulous, really.' EVENING STANDARD 'The book's real power lies in its between-the-lines warning that our embrace of the internet represents some kind of sleepwalk into oblivion. It's a provocative, tub-thumping sci-fi of which H. G. Wells might have been proud.' DAILY MAIL 'Harris' latest work intelligently warps historical fiction and tackles issues of religion, science and the apocalypse in the process. As he flexes his imagination, you will be left pondering as often as you are page-turning.' HERALD 'A brilliantly imaginative thriller' READER'S DIGEST

About the Author :
Robert Harris is the author of sixteen bestselling novels- the Cicero Trilogy - Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator - Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich, The Second Sleep, V2, Act of Oblivion and Precipice. His work has been translated into forty languages and nine of his books have been adapted for cinema and television. He lives in West Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby.

Review :
A thoroughly absorbing, page-turning narrative in which the author, with his customary storytelling skills, pulls us ever deeper into the imaginative world he has created. It [also] poses challenging questions about the meaning of the past, the idea of progress and the stability of civilisation. It is a fine addition to Harris’s diverse body of work. A return to the type of high-concept novel that made his name . . . [T]he writing is elegant and pacy. The characters are fleshed out and the plot zips along. A truly surprising future-history thriller. Fabulous, really. Harris is rightly praised as the master of the intelligent thriller. Genuinely thrilling, wonderfully conceived and entirely without preaching, it probes the nature of history, of collective memory and forgetting, and exposes the fragility of modern civilisation. Harris's bleak imagined world issues a clarion call to the present, urging us to recognise the value of progress, the importance of woolly concepts like liberalism and the rule of law, and all the other ideals we’ve spent generations fighting for yet seem prepared to sacrifice on the altar of populism. For make no mistake, this novel [is] very much about the here and now . . . Harris is a master of plotting and, in elegant, understated third-person prose, he ratchets the tension ever upwards . . . this is nothing if not a page-turner. Reading Robert Harris’s historical thrillers feels like attending a Simon Schama lecture on a roller-coaster – you come away with a new perspective on history while feeling dizzy with excitement . . . In The Second Sleep he takes us on a thrilling ride while serving up serious food for thought . . . I doubt there is a living writer who is better at simultaneously making readers’ adrenaline pump while their brains whirr. When Harris is at his best — and here he is — he writes with a skill and ingenuity that few other novelists can match. In this case, the usual page turning pleasures are joined by something else: a sense that, through his historical-futuristic setting, Harris has found a unique vantage point to comment on the present . . . This is a novel that not only makes you smile at its author’s brilliance, but induces a shiver of dread at how real it all seems. With a story of forbidden love joining larger themes, this vividly imagined, brilliantly clever novel is – as you’d expect from the author of Fatherland and Archangel – an absolutely class act. Harris . . . is a fearless writer. The Second Sleep races along at breakneck speed. The prose is pure, elegant, never tricky and his imagination knows no bounds. It is a strange premise for a thriller, but Robert Harris is such a wily old hand that it is a pleasure to accompany him on his time travels.