America City

Arthur C. Clarke Award-Winning Author

'An uneasy read that manages to feel both timely and urgent... Beckett offers an intelligent, visceral reminder that unless we change what today looks like, tomorrow will be turbulent indeed.' - Guardian



America, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.



Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.



But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?



Chris Beckett is a former university lecturer and social worker living in Cambridge. He is the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, 2009, for The Turing Test, the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2013, for Dark Eden and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award for Mother of Eden in 2015 and for Daughter of Eden in 2016.



An uneasy read that manages to feel both timely and urgent... Beckett offers an intelligent, visceral reminder that unless we change what today looks like, tomorrow will be turbulent indeed.



Compelling... a grim demonstration of how one person can change history, but not control it.



America City is beautifully written, inventive, with a strong cast of characters... and a plot that makes the reader think, and is another great book from one of the best writers around.



Chris Beckett is a genius



The Eden trilogy is a remarkable achievement: with wit, insight and invention Beckett has imagined a scientific Genesis not just about a society, but about the culture and myths that sustain it. It is both politically astute and theologically compelling.



Eden is building into one of most vivid and fascinating places in modern SF



Mother of Eden is a masterpiece



A classic theme, beautifully told



A captivating and haunting book