The Kingdoms

LONGLISTED FOR THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION 2021 BEST NOVEL

For fans of Matt Haig, Stuart Turton and Bridget Collins comes a sweeping historical adventure from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Come home, if you remember

The postcard has been held at the sorting office for ninety-one years, waiting to be delivered to Joe Tournier. On the front is a lighthouse – Eilean Mor, in the Outer Hebrides.

Joe has never left England, never even left London. He is a British slave, one of thousands throughout the French Empire. He has a job, a wife, a baby daughter.

But he also has flashes of a life he cannot remember and of a world that never existed – a world where English is spoken in England, and not French.

And now he has a postcard of a lighthouse built just six months ago, that was first written nearly one hundred years ago, by a stranger who seems to know him very well.

Joe's journey to unravel the truth will take him from French-occupied London to a remote Scottish island, and back through time itself as he battles for his life – and for a very different future.

About the Author

Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University.

After stints working at Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA.

She later studied in Tokyo, where she lived on a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, and she is now a visiting lecturer at City University.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is her first novel.