Cannonbridge

Literary trickery

Release Date: 12 February

208 pages | Paperback Author: Jonathan Barnes Publisher: Solaris

Matthew Cannonbridge

is the world’s best loved author. Wait, what do you mean you’ve never heard of him? He was at the villa in Geneva where Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein and he wrote The English Golem. He was friends with Dickens. He conferred with Arthur Conan Doyle while writing about the infamous detective, Monsieur Dupin. Cannonbridge! No?

No. Cannonbridge is an invention. Not just for this novel, but in the world of the novel, too. Someone’s been changing history, inserting a new writer into the canon. And while making up Victorian authors might not seem like a particularly dastardly plan, it has nasty side- effects. Cannonbridge isn’t just a man. He’s something else…

With a deft narrative woven smoothly through history, Jonathan Barnes’s novel is both smart and creepy. Back in the 1880s, a shadow hangs over Cannonbridge; in modern- day London, a professor who suspects the truth finds himself in mortal peril. The dark forces at work here are seriously dark, and properly mysterious, too; the conspiracy is so bizarre it’ll keep you hooked to the very end.

There’s something gleefully nerdy about the way so many famous authors are drawn into the story, and there’s a wicked satirical sense of humour underneath the narrative. Cannonbridge the writer might not be real, but Cannonbridge the novel deserves to become well- known. Sarah Dobbs Also recently out, and written by Jonathan Barnes: The Judgement Of Sherlock Holmes, a box set of four audio adventures.