Down-Station-by-Simon-Morden-Cover

“an intriguing world of fascinating surprises and inescapable consequences”

Escaping from an underground fire and certain death, Mary, Dalip and Stanislav are thrown together into another place.   With its uncanny skies, weird beasts and barely touched landscape, they find themselves in a lush green country sparsely populated by people who are carving their own rules.

The door they came through has disappeared and they have to make their own way in this strange land and, perhaps, create new futures for themselves: Dalip, the honourable Sikh engineer; Mary, the belligerent East End girl; and Stanislav, the workman with his murky, military past.

In “Down,” information is power and can be withheld or even stolen.  Can they trust the Wolfman’s directions ?  Who is the imperious Geomancer?  Will the mysterious man called Crows help them?

The story is told through Dalip and Mary’s eyes and I particularly enjoyed their characters’ evolution through the book from bewildered strangers to certain heroes.  But the star of the book is “Down” itself.  Morden gradually builds an intriguing world full of fascinating surprises and inescapable consequences; the drumbeat of danger gets louder when, like the landscape, events start to creep up and multiply.  Revelations start slow and get faster as the plot twists the narrative awry to end in a tense and thrilling conclusion.  Recommended.

Simon won the Philip K Dick Award in 2012 for  The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy.

Published in February 2016 by Gollancz.