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by Andrew Hunter Murray
In a disintegrating and lawless near-future, a young man journeys north to a mysterious island owned by one of the world's wealthiest men - and finds an entire new civilization waiting for him.
Ben is a painter from the crowded, turbulent city. For six months his fiancée, Cara, has been working on the remote island of Sanctuary Rock, the private estate of millionaire philanthropist Sir John Pemberley. Now she has decided to break off their engagement and stay there for good.
Ben travels to the island to try and win Cara back. After an arduous journey, he finds himself compelled to stay. But as Ben begins to traverse Pemberley's kingdom, he begins to uncover the truth of the apparently perfect society the enigmatic Sir John is building. Is Sanctuary Rock truly a second Eden, as he claims--or a previously undiscovered level of hell?
"Near-future thrillers don't come much better than this stellar effort from Murray...Murray excels at building a believable futuristic environment without getting bogged down in minutiae, and he wrings plenty of suspense out of Ben's increasingly harrowing investigation of Sanctuary Rock's mysterious purpose. This fires on all cylinders." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A suspenseful read with a dystopian theme." —Kirkus Reviews
"Literary touchstones include H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau and, of course, Shakespeare's The Tempest (Pemberley's daughter, Bianca, makes a superbly compromised Miranda). The plot is about eco-Nazis, obviously, but the considerable pleasure of this novel is in the getting from here to there." —The Times (UK)
"Murray's disturbing eco-thriller keeps its readers spellbound until the final chilling twist." —Daily Mail (UK)
"A brilliantly clever thriller by a brilliantly clever author." —Richard Osman New York Times bestselling author
"Imaginative and intriguing. The Sanctuary sucks you in and doesn't let you leave until the very last page—and a final revelation that left me thinking late into the night. Andrew Hunter Murray is a young writer to watch." —Anthony Horowitz, New York Times bestselling author
This information about The Sanctuary 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.
Andrew Hunter Murray is a writer and comedian. He is one of the writers and researchers behind the BBC show QI and also cohosts the spinoff podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, which, since 2014, has released 250 episodes, been downloaded 200 million times, and toured the world. It has also spawned two bestselling books, The Book of the Year and The Book of the Year 2018, as well as a BBC Two series No Such Thing as the News. Andrew also writes for Private Eye magazine and hosts the Eye's in-house podcast, Page 94, interviewing the country's best investigative journalists about their work. In his spare time he performs in the Jane Austen-themed improv comedy group Austentatious, which plays in London's West End and around the UK. The Last Day was his debut novel.
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