Red Smoking Mirror : 'The love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ Joanna Pocock

Author: Hunt, Nick

Historical fiction

Published on 6 June 2024 by Swift Press in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 288 pages
200 x 130 x 21 | 244g

‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ - Joanna Pocock, author of SurrenderShortlisted in the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards for the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of PlaceThe 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.