Geryon Wynter, the brilliant Elizabethan mystic, has achieved resurrection and returned to present-day Rotherweird. But after the chaos of Election Day, how can a stranger from another time wrest control? And for what fell purpose is Wynter back?
His dark conspiracy reaches its climax in this unique corner of England, where the study of history is forbidden and neither friend nor foe are quite what they seem.
The stakes could not be higher, for at the endgame, not only Rotherweird is under threat. The future of mankind itself hangs in the balance.
Andrew Caldecott is a QC specialising in media, defamation and libel law, as well as a novelist and occasional playwright. He represented the BBC in the Hutton Inquiry (into the death of biological warfare expert and UN weapons inspector David Kelly), the Guardian in the Leveson Inquiry (into the British press following the phone hacking scandal), and supermodel Naomi Campbell in her landmark privacy case, amongst many others.
His first produced play, Higher than Babel, was described as 'Assured and ambitious . . . deeply impressive debut' by Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard and 'Vivid and absorbing and grapples with big ideas without being dry, difficult or patronising' by Sarah Hemming, in the Financial Times, but informed by his love of history, which he studied at New College, Oxford, he was seized by the notion of a city-state hiding a cataclysmic secret: the result, Rotherweird. 'A history-tragic-comedy all rolled into one', says Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, and 'baroque, Byzantine and beautiful,' according to M.R, Carey, author of The Girl with all the Gifts.