Description

‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ – Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender

Shortlisted in the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards for the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place

The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.

For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma’s breathtaking capital, assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea…

A bravura reimagining of an alternate history, Red Smoking Mirror is a richly written novel of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash, and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.

Publisher Review

‘A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was’ – Guardian ‘Full of shadowy secrets, cloak-and-dagger politics and intimate betrayals’ – Financial Times ‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ – Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender ‘Like a haiku a couple of hundred pages long, Red Smoking Mirror is taut, poised and powerful. There’s not a spare word. Every inflection counts. Hunt has produced something truly special; a novel that both broods and races, and which tells us vital, troubling and hopeful things about ourselves’ – Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild ‘A vivid, richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity, both in its detail and in its emotional impact’ – Cynan Jones, author of Cove ‘Nick Hunt deftly pulls off a delicately embroidered tale of what so easily might have been … A feast of language and imagination, briming with very real detail and insight’ – Benedict Allen, author of Explorer ‘A novel of great originality, humanity, and quest’ – Dan Richards, author of Outpost ‘The reader wanders through Hunt’s richly imagined Tenochtitlan in a beautiful stupor … A distinguished travel writer, Hunt enlivens his city with the sorts of passing details that make a place concrete … brilliant’ – Michael La Pointe, TLS Praise for Nick Hunt:

‘Travel writing in excelsis’ – Jan Morris

‘Nick Hunt has written a glorious book, rich with insight and wit, about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe’ – Robert Macfarlane

‘A thrilling and gorgeous tale, packed with meteorological wonder’ – Amy Liptrot

‘A beautiful, disquieting book’ – William Atkins

‘Nick Hunt’s bold exploration of our hidden continent makes you fall in wonder with the Earth again. Passionate, learned, surprising and revelatory, this is a journey for our times’ – Kapka Kassabova ‘Unusual, highly original debut novel that will hopefully not prove his only venture into fiction’ – The New European