Vurt author and Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Jeff Noon has signed a two-book deal with Angry Robot Books. The first book is A Man of Shadows, a science fiction mystery in which a private eye stalks a serial killer in a city whose zones are split between eternal day and endless night; it will be published in the US and UK by Angry Robot in August 2017.
The deal came about after a fan of Vurt tweeted at Angry Robot suggesting that (in the publisher’s words) “Angry Robot should track down Jeff and return him to his rightful prominence.” Here’s the synopsis for A Man of Shadows:
Below the neon skies of Dayzone—a city where the lights never go out, and night has been banished—lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest to track down Eleanor Bale takes him from Dayzone, to the permanently blacked-out alleyways of Nocturna. As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city’s fate. In the end, there’s only one place left to search: the strange, mysterious realm known as Dusk, a place of ghosts, mists and living shadows.
“I’m so excited to be part of the Angry Robot adventure!” Noon said in a press release. “They offer the perfect combination of independence and book business know-how, and they’re nurtured and promoted some brilliant books and writers over the years. I’m very happy that my new science fiction-mystery novel, A Man of Shadows, will bear their logo.”
Angry Robot Publisher and Managing Director Marc Gascoigne said, “I’m grinning from ear to ear because we have signed up Jeff Noon, with an extraordinarily strong return to active writing duty. I’ve not read a book like this—one part science fiction-mystery, one part total rearrangement of normal reality—since China Mieville’s The City & The City. Just splendid.”
