The great when

Moore, author of Jerusalem (2016) and Illuminations (2022), introduces a new series with this first volume. Young Dennis Knuckleyard works for Coffin Ada, a terrifying old woman who coughs constantly and generally torments him; he's nervous when she sends him to acquire a collection of occult books from a local seller. But when he brings home an extra book, she sits him down with a firm warning. This book should not exist. It comes from a different London, a "realer" version of archetypes and incarnations. And Dennis will have to enter the other London if he doesn't want to be killed for having proof that it exists. The novel is full of wild characters, and Dennis is at a loss in their midst, doing his best merely to get himself out of all this, much in the vein of Richard Mayhew in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. 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.

Bestseller Moore (Illuminations) brings the rich detail and intricate plotting familiar to his fans to the first epic fantasy in his Long London series, set in 1949 and premised on the notion that "there might be a higher world concealed behind our own." That hidden truth is revealed to an entertainingly unprepossessing protagonist, 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, who works in a used bookstore owned by his landlady, Coffin Ada. Dennis encounters the supernatural while on a quotidian errand: he's sent to another book dealer to purchase a lot of rare Arthur Machen books, hopefully at a bargain. But the haul includes an additional title, Reverend Thomas Hampole's A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis, which, Coffin Ada reveals, is not a real book: "It's not in catalogues. It's not in libraries. Arthur fucking Machen made it up in a cough cough cough novel.... This shouldn't be here. This comes from cough cough cough somewhere else." Possessing this little piece of a parallel universe soon proves deadly dangerous, and could break down the barriers between the "real" London and the one Dennis lives in, which, it turns out, is just a shadow of the other. The worldbuilding is extraordinary and the plot is utterly gripping. Readers are sure to be sucked in. (Oct.)