Angelmaker

By: Nick Harkaway

Narrated by: Daniel Weyman

Length: 17 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

From the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World - a new riveting action spy thriller, blistering gangster noir, and howling absurdist comedy: a propulsively entertaining tale about a mobster's son and a retired secret agent who are forced to team up to save the world.

All Joe Spork wants is a quiet life. He repairs clockwork and lives above his shop in a wet, unknown bit of London. The bills don't always get paid and he's single and has no prospects of improving his lot, but at least he's not trying to compete with the reputation of Mathew "Tommy Gun" Spork, his infamous criminal dad.

Edie Banister lives quietly and wishes she didn't. She's nearly ninety and remembers when she wasn't. She's a former superspy and now she's... well... old. Worse yet, the things she fought to save don't seem to exist anymore, and she's beginning to wonder if they ever did.

When Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended.

The client is one Edie Banister. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis. With Joe's once-quiet world now populated with mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realises that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she gave up years ago, and pick up his father's old gun....

©2012 Nick Harkaway (P)2012 Random House AudioGo

Critic reviews

"Angelmaker is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in ages...a joyful display of reckless, delightful invention, on a par with the rocket-powered novels of Neal Stephenson.... Ideas come zinging in from all corners, and do so with linguistic verve and tremendous humour. ... It’s brilliantly entertaining, and the last hundred pages are pure, unhinged delight. What a splendid ride." (Patrick Ness, Guardian)

"It hangs together so brilliantly…It’s an ambitious, crowded, restless caper, cleverly told and utterly immune to precis…From its frantic oscillation between plausibility and fantasy emerges an odd, unique composite that deserves its own moniker. ...Angelmaker turns out to be a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of “good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime." (James Purdon, Observer Guardian)

“Angelmaker is an intricate and brilliant piece of escapism, tipping its hat to the twisting plots of John Buchan and H Rider Haggard, the goggles-and-gauntlets Victoriana of the steampunk movement and the labyrinthine secret London’s of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, while maintaining an originality, humour and verve all its author’s own… Angelmaker must have been huge fun to write, and it is huge fun to read.” (Daily Telegraph, five stars)