It's twenty years since the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and the bitmites took reality apart, twenty years since Phreedom Messenger disappeared into the wilderness and Seamus Finnan was imprisoned in his own past. Twenty years of chaos but the Dukes, the remnants of the Covenant, still cling to power in their enclaves of order in the bitmite-devastated wilderness . . . in their Havens in the Hinter.

Across the folds of time and space, though, rogues and rebels are rising up against the Empire. From a mediaeval fortress where wandering mummers stage a Harlequin play based on Euripides's The Bacchae and performed in the Cant ... to Kentigern where another Harlequin, Jack Flash, wreaks havoc on a fascist state that thought him dead. From a 1939 Paris where Jack Carter and Seamus Finnan, heroes of the International Brigades, seek to rewrite history -- to a 1929 Berlin where a very different Jack seeks to save the world from a history he has helped make real. Locked in an eternal battle of chaos and order, it seems everyone must play their part now, as rebel or tyrant, hero or villain.

`It is, quite simply, stunning and the most powerful debut novel I've read since Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell ' -- Forbidden Planet International