Illuminations: The Top 5 Sunday Times Bestseller

Description

'A wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving ... Both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality' NEIL GAIMAN 'One of the great fiction minds of his generation' ROLLING STONE In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, international bestselling author and legendary creator of From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other modern classics, Alan Moore, presents nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, each taking us deeper into the fantastical underside of reality. In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for fantastical specialists fall in love, with tragic ramifications. In Not Even Legend, a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In Illuminations, a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella What We Can Know About Thunderman, which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that - a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic. 'One of the most significant fiction writers in English ... Moore's influence can be felt everywhere - in our literature, on our screens, in our politics' GUARDIAN

Alan Moore is an English writer widely regarded as the best and most influential writer in the history of comics. His seminal works include From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He is also the author of the bestselling Jerusalem. He was born in Northampton, and has lived there ever since.

'Illuminations is a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving. A few are stories I've loved for years (in one case, for decades), some were new to me, often managing to be both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality, written in language that coruscates, concatenates and glitters. But the short stories in this book also turn out to be a sort of camouflage, or a frame, for 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' a short novel that's a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious, unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four colour funnies. It's Alan Moore's Guernica, a time-hopping ontological Imaginary Story that refuses to leave your head after you've read it' * Neil Gaiman * One of the great fiction minds of his generation * Rolling Stone * The king of comics * Guardian * Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal neverending * Financial Times * His bighearted passion for his people ... and the whole monstrous endeavour of the human condition is infectious. I'm not sure there's a God, but I thank Her for Alan Moore * Entertainment Weekly * One of the most significant fiction writers in English ... Moore's influence can be felt everywhere-in our literature, on our screens, in our politics * Guardians *