A Best Book of Summer from Literary Hub
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from BookPage
“I had heard Prophet (accurately) described as a genre mash-up, blending the best of techno-noir, dystopian sci-fi, and espionage procedural (with a dash of queer romance). And while it is all those things, at its heart Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s tightly wound (yet somehow tender?) mystery-sci-fi-thriller is a philosophical novel… What is life without mystery? And at what point does nostalgia grow so strong it derails our lives?” — Literary Hub
“The authors’ most irresistible achievement… is their odd-couple pairing of the Dionysian Rao with the fastidious Rubenstein, who bicker and banter contentiously despite their fondness for each other. The well-matched authors make good on their audacious premise.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A beautiful, tense, strange, and heartfelt first collaboration from a duo not to be missed.” — Shelf Awareness
“Shrewdly imagined, sharply crafted, witty, chilling, psychologically lush, grotesque, and romantic.” — Booklist
“Unlike many sci-fi titles, the focus of the book revolves around the two main characters rather than on action sequences or futuristic technologies. This allows for plenty of mystery and drama as the story shifts between the present and the past, intertwining the two men and a substance that is making time essentially irrelevant.” — Library Journal
“Fabulous… Present day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel with real people you can care about. And it’s a page-turner. So good.” — Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
“Prophet is a crackling, shape-shifting romp with big ideas and a bigger heart. Blaché and Macdonald take a no-holds-barred approach to manifesting the ways in which individual desires are exploited by the systems we live under, and ask the necessary question of whether escape from that cycle is possible. This is a display of sheer inventiveness, and a delight.” — C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold
“Absorbing, fast-paced and febrile, Prophet takes you through the world at an angle, exposing cracks in the reality we think we inhabit. An exhilarating and surprisingly tender trip.” — G. Willow Wilson, author of Alif the Unseen
“Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald have turned nostalgia - ‘the trash of hearts’ - into a world and a trap. Prophet promises to bring back everything you lost and now yearn for. Is it a drug? Or is it a new state of matter? Whatever it is, it's proper science fiction—self-aware, funny, ruthlessly propulsive, full of invention, parodic yet perfectly serious about its underlying issues with contemporary retro culture, and ending with a complex, emotionally satisfying extension of the personal into the sublime. I loved it.” — M John Harrison, author of Light
“Prophet is a wildly fun, inventive, funny, and terrifying book, with a superb mystery that gets ever more compelling and weird and, horrifyingly, familiar. This book finds the nightmare in the comforting lies we tell ourselves about our pasts, and how they inform our present.” — Phil Klay, author of Uncertain Ground
"A hyperkinetic headrush of a novel that proves its organic bona fides by getting you drunk with ideas before casually and cataclysmically breaking your heart." — Paraic O’Donnell, author of The House on Vesper Sands
2023-07-13
An intriguing and deftly plotted (if overstuffed) hybrid of dystopian SF, medical thriller, and queer romance.
Chaotic, irreverent Sunil Rao, an ex–MI6 agent plucked from jail for the assignment, and cool, analytical, ultraorderly Adam Rubenstein, an American intelligence officer, have worked together before under extremely trying circumstances, and when a bizarre series of events unfolds at a U.S. air base in Britain, culminating in the sudden appearance in the countryside of a full-sized generic American diner, the two are reunited to investigate. Rao has the uncanny ability not only to detect lies, but to intuit the truth of anything said in his presence, and the buttoned-up Adam is the only person he can't read, an inscrutability that makes their collaboration possible and creates odd-couple tension. Soon they land at a top-secret lab in Colorado, on the trail of a new pharmacologic substance called Prophet. The drug, which resembles mercury, has the effect of spontaneously creating comfort objects from the nostalgic memories of those exposed to it...but with horrendous side effects: The affected person disappears down the rabbit hole of the memory, plunging into a comalike state, sometimes even dying. Worse, those effects—aided by reckless experimentation—are intensifying; the protean substance keeps evolving unpredictably. Adam and Rao turn out to be perfectly suited to the investigation; after an initial exposure, the former is immune to Prophet (it even shrinks from him), and the latter proves able to extract and assimilate the drug. The book’s first section feels a bit languid and talky, but the pace accelerates in the middle, and the long final action sequence, in which Rao, Adam, and a team of military contractors negotiate a bizarre, surreal, deadly desert landscape of plush toys (some of them animate), bicycles, arcade games, golden apple trees, and the like, is excellent: pulse-pounding, philosophically fascinating, even blackly funny. The romance plot feels both fresh (in who its principals are) and creaky (there's too much slow-on-the-uptake and swelling music).
A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down.
