From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. This stimulating and bruising sequel to Scottish author Duncan's neo-Joycean_ Vellum_ (2006) projects the endless battle between good and evil onto a kaleidoscopic multitude of parallel alternative realities. Duncan's debut introduced bionanotech-enhanced humans, who clashed with ordinary humans in a 2017 apocalypse. The Carter family of Glasgow guarded the God-commissioned titular Book, but now the scribe and angel Metatron has hidden the Book somewhere in the infinite folds of a realm called the Vellum and is preparing to die. Meanwhile, a host of eerie characters, including foul-mouthed Jack "Flash" Carter, Puck-figure Thomas Messenger and Jack's shrink, Guy Renard Carter, search for the Book. Full of riffs on myths from throughout human history as well as allusions to Euripides'_Bacchae_, this enormous, stinging, poignant hymn engenders a terrible beauty all its own. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistIn the sequel to Vellum (2005), the Covenant has been broken, but the angel and demon unkin still compete for power over the worlds of the Vellum. Playing out against a backdrop of futurism and fascism and little pockets of stagnant order--havens, where the bitmites make all the things humans have ever dreamed up possible--the split parts of Mad Jack, Joey Narcosis, Phreedom, and the rest of their crew seek to rewrite the Book of All Hours and bring the angels and demons to their knees for good. Duncan's multilayered storytelling--a mad ride through alternate histories of the twentieth century and beyond--makes for a complex and tangled narrative whose strands are slowly woven together to a satisfying denouement. As in Vellum, Duncan draws on classical sources in Ink, this time Euripides' Bacchae and some of Virgil's pastoral works, to great effect. Ink delivers beautifully on the promise of Vellum, with an excellent mixture of adventure, danger, and the fantastic. Regina Schroeder Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Ink: The Book of All Hours PDF

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