Prophet

By: Helen Macdonald, Sin Blaché

Narrated by: Jake Fairbrother, Ryan Forde Iosco, Charlotte Davey

Brought to you by Penguin.

Daring, surprising and superbly plotted, this is a fresh thriller from a dynamic new duo in genre fiction

Your happiest memory is their deadliest weapon.

THIS IS PROPHET.

It knows when you were happiest. It gives life to your fondest memories and uses them to destroy you. But who has created it? And what do they want?

An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. It's brightly lit, warm and inviting but it has no power, no water, no connection to the real world. It's like a memory made flesh - a nostalgic flight of fancy. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past.

And the deaths quickly follow.

Something is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. This is a weapon like no other. But nobody knows who created it, or why.

Sunil Rao seems a surprising choice of investigator. Chaotic and unpredictable, the former agent is the antithesis of his partner Colonel Adam Rubenstein, the model of a military man. But Sunil has the unique ability to distinguish truth from lies: in objects, words and people, in the past and in real time. And Adam is the only one who truly knows him, after a troubled past together. Now, as they battle this strange new reality, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear.

For Prophet can weaponise the past. But only love will protect the future.

©2023 Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"It's a fabulous book!... It's present day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel with real people you can care about." (Neil Gaiman)

"Prophet promises to bring back everything you lost and now yearn for... Proper science fiction - self-aware, funny, ruthlessly propulsive, full of invention... I loved it." (M. John Harrison, author of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again)

"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 Missionaries)