SWC: Book Launch Douglas Thompson & Neil Williamson

Douglas Thompson’s eighth novel The Rhymer, is a satire on contemporary society, the art world, and a comic-poetic meditation on the nature of life, death and morality. A mysterious tramp wanders from town to town, taking a new name and identity from whoever he encounters. Haunting him constantly is the resemblance he apparently bears to his brother, a successful artist called Zenir. Setting out to pursue Zenir and denounce or blackmail him out of spite, Nadith finds he is always two steps behind a figure as enigmatic and polyfaceted as himself.

Thompson’s first book, Ultrameta, was nominated for the Edge Hill Prize, and shortlisted for the BFS Best Newcomer Award, and he has published six subsequent novels, Sylvow, Apoidea, Mechagnosis, Entanglement, The Brahan Seer, and Volwys.

Neil Williamson’s The Moon King is a stunning debut novel from one of genre-fiction’s most exciting new voices. All is not well in Glassholm. Life under the moon has always been so predictable: day follows night, wax phases to wane and, after the despair of every Darkday, a person’s mood soars to euphoria at Full. So it has been for five hundred years, since the Lunane captured the moon and tethered it to the city. Now all that has changed. Amidst rumours of unsettling dreams and strange whispering children, society is disintegrating into unrest and violence.

Williamson’s The Ephemera was shortlisted for 2007 British Fantasy Award for best short story collection, and his short story, Arrhythmia was shortlisted for the 2011 British Science Fiction Award.