When Denzel and his fellow trader Winston lead their pack-ponies home from the small Lancastrian port of Bolton, he’s amazed when he finds the strangely wrapped body of a girl floating in a pool beside the track. This turns out, though, to be only the first of many mysteries involving Denzel and his Gaian College at Wallsuches.
What’s behind the longstanding animosity between the neighbouring hamlet of Horwich and the fishing port of Chorley? Why has it recently spilled over into bloody conflict? How might this threaten Denzel’s College and its remote Gaian Foundation in the Lancastrian capital of Clitheroe? And what part, if any, does the enigmatic girl found in the pool play in all this?
Set in a future Lancashire, after climate change, we follow Denzel as he’s dragged not only into a search for answers, but into a fight against a legacy from his world’s cataclysmic past. And against all this upheaval, can Denzel finally fulfil a promise he made many years before to his lamented younger sister?
I love all of Mr. Johnson's books but this one is now my favorite. A master writer who only gets better with each book.
This story takes a behind-the-curtain look at all of mankind's follies. We see a world where people have come close to destroying everything that makes the earth sustainable but still no one has learned from the past’s mistakes. Men are still trying to rage wars against each other, and they are still mishandling the earth's resources. There seems to be no end to man's ignorance but maybe - just maybe - with help from an unlikely source there's hope if they only heed the warning.