PROPHET

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by Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald RELEASE DATE: today

A crisply written, inventive, complicated brew of a novel, though one that could have used some boiling down.

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.

Pub Date: today

ISBN: 9780802162021

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023

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