Search Worlds Without End

WFA and Shirley Jackson Award nominated novella.

An isolated, struggling fishing village, inward-looking and increasingly dependent on the outside world for its survival.

And then at dawn, one early-summer morning, the fifteen-year-old Sarah Carr witnesses a group of mermaids, and immediately that small, suspicious world is divided between those of its inhabitants desperate to regard this sighting as their salvation, as something to be advertised and exploited; and those who understand only too well the ridicule, pity and contempt this might equally swiftly bring down upon them.

All now depends on somehow verifying what Sarah Carr says she saw, and over the course of those few overheated days, the whole world appears in turmoil--a place of scarcely-believable wonders and possibilities; a place of squandered opportunities, and of tawdry and regrettable compromises.

And for those few tumultuous, alarming days a natural balance is irretrievably lost, and the whole village, with the girl immovable and unflinching at its centre, struggles to regain that balance and to ensure that that which might secure and safeguard its future--the sighting of the mythical creatures themselves--does not now, ultimately lead to its destruction from within.

The stunning new novel from one of the UK's finest literary writers.

The far north of England, one hundred years in the future, the Gulf stream has ceased: Quinn has been appointed by the government to conduct an audit on a remote area of land designated for a brand new model town. As Quinn arrives to greet the local developer, the surveillance cameras spin into overdrive, and soon he is immersed in a quagmire of corruption that will put his integrity to the ultimate test.

He meets Owen, a suicidal farmer whose every last pig, chicken, and sheep has been culled. And Winston, a former journalist and alcoholic with a gallery of incriminating photos of rising water below the site; and Pollard, the local Man of God whose faith is for sale. But it is Anna, Quinn's some-time girlfriend in charge of 'digging, filling and capping' the dead cattle pits, who faces the deepest abyss of all. And as the heavens open once again, the mountains of toxic soil that surround the site slowly begin to shift.

An all too plausible Orwellian vision that depicts what is likely to unfurl if climate changes move implacably on, Robert Edric's latest novel is a devastating portrait of Man's ever-quickening descent into a self-inflicted hell. It is Edric's finest novel yet.