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Cowl

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Cowl

By: Neal Asher
Narrated by: Peter Noble
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Summary

Cowl is a high-octane time travel adventure from Britain's master of widescreen science fiction, Neal Asher.

He's the nightmare you never imagined . . .

In the far-future, the Heliothane Dominion triumphed after a bitter war. But some enemies escaped into the past, to wreak havoc across time. The worst is Cowl – originally human, until artificially-forced evolution made him something else entirely.

Polly is unprepared for her involvement with Nandru Jurgens. He’s a Taskforce soldier, now hunted by killers. Nor can Polly resist the alien 'tor' she’s compelled to attach to her arm. But when she’s dragged through time, she learns fast. Tack has a tor fragment embedded in his wrist – a bloody reminder of Heliothane’s government. As their vat-grown assassin, he’s no stranger to violence. But the extent of this mission is different.

Meanwhile, a beast hunts its targets through time’s alternate dimensions. This is Cowl's pet tor – and it’s eager to feed.

 Adventure Cyberpunk Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction Space Opera Time Travel Fiction

Critic reviews

In Cowl Neal Asher seems to be doing to the time-travel adventure what he has been doing to space opera and planetary romance: to pump it full of performance-enhancing substances and send it crashing through a gigantically expanded version of its traditional milieu, exploding the big sets and sending body parts flying in all directions.
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Another excellent storyline from the master, I sincerely hope there is much more to come from this alternate to the polity !

Awesome storyline and exceptional narration!

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Definitely worth persevering. I love the story and love the performance. Time travel is always complicated I guess 🤪

The story is mind bendingly complicated but...

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I am a big fan of Neal Asher and have got all his library including short stories, some of his books are outstanding and some are very readable but lack the impetus, this is a good book and worth adding to any persons library but it is not his best

Interesting and engaging but not great

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This is a great idea of a story and not particularly difficult to follow but unlike Asher's polity universe which is amazingly well crafted and a credible future of humanity this seems a little more difficult to put down on paper and temporal paradoxes are always difficult to sell !

good book but perhaps not Asher's strongest work.

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Really fantastically narrated by Peter Noble, but a difficult story to keep track of occurrences, names and all the rest.

Phenomenally confusing, fantastically narrated

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