The Great When
A Long London Novel
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The Great When
Narrated by:
Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
Buy Now for £15.01
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Narrated by:
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Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
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By:
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Alan Moore
Nominated for Best Performance: Narrator at The Speakies (The British Audio Awards).
This audiobook features an exclusive essay, The True History of What Didn’t Happen, written and read by Alan Moore.
From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an enthralling new series about murder, magic, and madness set between two Londons—one recovering from World War II, and one a secret world unlike any other.
“Extraordinary . . . very funny . . . It does what fantasy does best which is show us something beyond our experience.” —Susanna Clarke, New York Times bestselling author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
In 1949, amidst the smog of London, Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop, discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, one only existing within another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?
Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks facing gruesome and grave repercussions.
So begins a journey delving deep into the city’s occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some from legend, some frighteningly real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever . . .(P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Moore is a wizardly prose stylist whose sentences flow in a Joycean stream . . . If you’re looking for a writer to ensorcell you in a saga of hard-boiled crime and surrealist horror, here is your magus.
Extraordinary . . . very funny . . . It does what fantasy does best which is show us something beyond our experience.
The worldbuilding is extraordinary and the plot is utterly gripping. Readers are sure to be sucked in.
The Great When is a corker . . . Moore is entirely in charge here, confident and witty and pulling us along. The Great When is the first book in The Long London Quintet. If you read it, that fact will make you very happy indeed.
[A] wondrous and polyphonic adventure . . . Maximalism is *in* again, folks: strap in and have yourself a blast.
Like Dickens, Alan Moore has us waiting on the dock, impatient for the next installment of his breathless, time-travelling classic. A preternaturally convincing hallucination from London's fetid past transports us, in some mysterious way, over the abyss of our impoverished post-digital present. Savage, humane, comic, terrifying: and that's just the first page. Now read on.
A profound, gorgeous novel of secret magics and lost souls.
Alan Moore is a visionary artist and a myth maker, and in The Great When he delivers the mystical core of the occult tradition of London: a fantasy novel that features Arthur Machen, Austin Osman Spare, an alternative world that is more real than ours, bookstores, crime and a city traumatized by the war. And he does this with fun, with challenging and beautiful writing, with delight and with the knowledge that there are portals and only a few can access them. This is a weird book and it's a complete joy.
The Great When, a book with a keen sense of the uncanny, has a pleasant lightness.
Moore constructs a world that blurs the lines between the seen and unseen, tethering his vision to both historical touchstones and a magickal alternate dimension. This is not just a story; it is also an act of literary alchemy that challenges readers to question the realities they take for granted—and to revel in the shadow world of their own imaginations.
Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal never-ending.
A rollicking adventure.
Moore’s latest is a love letter to the city of London, full of small ironies and nods to the history and character of its neighborhoods as well as its resilience post-WWII.
A wildly kinetic and entertaining adventure . . . as well as a kind of postwar coming-of-age tale for its young protagonist and his spirited companion.
Moore's mastery of the prose.
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