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From the extraordinary minds of award-winning and New York Times–bestselling author of H Is for Hawk Helen Macdonald and first time author Sin Blaché, Prophet is their electric debut, a tantalizing adventure fusing noir, sci-fi and a slow burn queer romance—set in a universe just one perilous step from our own.
Adam Rubenstein and Sunil Rao have been reluctant partners since their Uzbekistan days. Adam is a seemingly unflappable American Intelligence officer and Rao is an ex-MI6 agent, an addict and rudderless pleasure hound, with the uncanny ability to discern the truth of things—about everyone and everything other than Adam. When an American diner turns up in a foggy field in the UK after a mysterious death, Adam and Rao are called in to investigate, setting into motion the most dangerous and otherworldly mission of their lives.
In a surreal, action-packed quest that takes Adam and Rao from secret laboratories in Colorado, to a luxury lodge in Aspen, to the remote Nevada desert, the pair begins to uncover how and why people's fondest memories are being weaponized against them by a spooky, ever-shifting substance called Prophet. As the unlikely twosome battles this strange new reality, Prophet's victims' memories are materializing in increasingly bizarre forms: favorite games, beloved pets, fairground rides, each more malevolent than the next. Prophet is like no enemy Adam and Rao - or the world - have ever come up against.
A tension-shot odd-couple romance, an unflinching send-up of corporate corruption, and a genre-bending tour de force, Prophet is a triumph of storytelling by a new writing duo with a thrilling future.
"The authors' most irresistible achievement… is their odd-couple pairing of the Dionysian Rao with the fastidious Rubenstein, who bicker and banter contentiously despite their fondness for each other. The well-matched authors make good on their audacious premise." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down." —Kirkus Reviews
"Shrewdly imagined, sharply crafted, witty, chilling, psychologically lush, grotesque, and romantic." —Booklist
"Unlike many sci-fi titles, the focus of the book revolves around the two main characters rather than on action sequences or futuristic technologies. This allows for plenty of mystery and drama as the story shifts between the present and the past, intertwining the two men and a substance that is making time essentially irrelevant." —Library Journal
"A beautiful, tense, strange, and heartfelt first collaboration from a duo not to be missed." —Shelf Awareness
"I had heard Prophet (accurately) described as a genre mash-up, blending the best of techno-noir, dystopian sci-fi, and espionage procedural (with a dash of queer romance). And while it is all those things, at its heart Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché's tightly wound (yet somehow tender?) mystery-sci-fi-thriller is a philosophical novel… What is life without mystery? And at what point does nostalgia grow so strong it derails our lives?" —Literary Hub
"Fabulous… Present day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel with real people you can care about. And it's a page-turner. So good." —Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
This information about Prophet was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler's Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.
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