With his first full novel in almost ten years (not counting his Doctor Who book), Michael Moorcock - the most influential figure in modern fantasy and science fiction - returns to the city of his birth. London has always been a central character in Moorcock's work, from the high-literary fiction of MOTHER LONDON to the roof gardens of Jerry Cornelius.Now return to London just after the war, a city desperately trying to get back on its feet. And one young boy, Michael Moorcock, who is about to discover a world of magic and wonder. Between his first tentative approaches to adulthood - a job on Fleet Street, the first stirrings of his interest in writing - and a chance encounter with a mysterious Carmelite Friar, we see a version of Moorcock's life that is simultaneously a biography and a story. Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians, this is Moorcock at his dazzling, mercurial best.

The multiverse is exposed in all its sordid glory as we are shown glimpses of eight different futures, each in the form of 'The Alternative Apocalypse'. Treating time as the mutable imposter it is, the third Jerry Cornelius novel ranges across the ages from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the swinging London of the '60s and '70s, from turn-of-the-century music halls to 1930's seaside resorts. Leading us across time and space are the likes of Jerry's beloved sister Catherine and villainous brother Frank, wily adversary Miss Brunner, the grotesque Bishop Beesley and cool, anarchist revolutionary Una Persson, while Jerry Cornelius - the English Assassin - lies close to death's door. For now.