Description

Lower Rhumbsford is a city far removed from its glory days. On the banks of the great River Rhumb, its founding fathers channelled the river’s mighty flow into a subterranean labyrinth of pipes, valves and sluices, a feat of hydraulic prowess that would come to power an empire. But a thousand years have passed since then, and something is wrong: the pipes are leaking, the valves stuck, the sluices silted, and the once-torrential Rhumb has been reduced to a sluggish trickle.

The fortunes of the Locke family, descendants of the city’s most celebrated engineer, are similarly reduced. In a once-fashionable quarter of the once-great city, siblings Samuel and Briony Locke are about to be drawn into a web of ancestral secrets and imperial intrigues, as a ruthless new power arises…

Reviews for A Clockwork River:

‘Exuberant isn’t often a word you’d apply to fantasy novels, but A Clockwork River rushes along at a pace to match the waterway at its heart’ SFX

‘Delightfully weird and clever’ Grimdark Magazine

‘Oh, just plunge into this “hydro-punk” fantasy novel, will you’ The Times

Publisher Review

'Oh, just plunge into this 'hydro-punk' fantasy novel, will you. It's as charming as it is uncontainable, an uber-confident picaresque comedy in the authentic, madcap 18th-century manner' The Times. * The Times * 41/2 stars! Exuberant isn't often a word you'd apply to fantasy novels, but A Clockwork River rushes along at a pace to match the waterway at its heart * SFX Magazine * It is delightfully weird, clever, and a luxuriously slow novel set in a historical urban fantasy world * Grimdark Magazine * A monumental hydropunk novel centred around a hydraulic city in danger of collapse, Emery's meticulously realised fantasy brings in everything from house spirits and troglodytes to the Ladies Whist Club * Waterstones * A languid and lengthy exploration of societal expectations and boundaries across multiple tiers and cultures, all told through a narrative voice that has humour and intelligence in spades and is not afraid to use them to follow random tangents and relate these tales in complex sentences using complex vocabulary. It shouldn't work, this arduous spiralling of detail over many, many hours of reading, and yet somehow, 12ish hours later, it has * British Fantasy Society *