The second of 2 contests I’m announcing today, this contest is an opportunity to win the best book of 2005 (which I told you all about last June). I reviewed Vellum last year when it was released in the UK, and it’s coming to the U.S. this month!
Scottish author Duncan’s challenging SF debut, the first in a two-book series about an epic battle between good and evil, reveals the history of the advanced, ancient and powerful civilization of Kur through Egyptian, Babylonian and East Indian myth as well as bitmites, cyber-avatars and warring bands of fallen angels. A book, The Vellum (aka The Book of All Hours), is both portal to parallel realities and guide to a language of power that can be both inscribed in the skin and on the soul. Since individual characters like Seamus Finnan, Jack Carter, Thomas Messenger and Thomas’s sister, Phreedom, whose lives are destroyed, prolonged and forever scarred by contact with a realm called the Vellum, tend to appear and reappear at intervals often 20 or 40 years apart, their adventures in the human, parallel and cyber universes can be hard to follow. Readers who persevere will find this a truly rewarding read. – Publisher’s Weekly
“It’s one of the most assured first novels of the decade, and it’s a novel many writers beginning their tenth novel would kill to have written” – Jeff Vandermeer
“…a novel of incredible ambition, a head-on collision between Borges and, say, Neil Gaiman, with a breathtaking metaphysical conceit…” – The Glasgow Herald
..the locales visited on his journey made me feel like I was a great Khan listening to my Venetian explorer of his recent travels, yet at other times in the Vellum I felt I may be viewing alternate versions of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty traveling the country side, Mr. Duncan, also took me, along with Phree, and Thomas, back to a locale I am personally familiar with, a small college town in North Carolina, a bohemian stronghold in the conservative South, and turned it into a gate to the Underworld. Through it all, whether reading of the Messenger twins, Seamus, Jack, or even the voice of God himself, Metatron, in whatever manifestations, I felt like I may have been catching a glimpse of the world as Bill Lee/Burroughs saw it. – ME!
Who Can Win?
Open to all FBS Members.
How do you Win?
PM and you are entered.
What is the deadline?
Let’s say May 10th.
Good luck to all who participate, and a special thanks to Del-Rey and Hal Duncan for the hook up.
