Chris Beckett

A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumors of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection,...

America, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods, and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south. Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator...

South America, 1990. Ben Ronson, a British police officer, arrives in a mysterious forest to investigate a spate of killings of Duendes. These silent, vaguely humanoid creatures with long limbs and black button eyes have a strange psychic effect on people, unleashing the subconscious and exposing their innermost thoughts and fears. Ben becomes fascinated by the Duendes, but the closer he gets, the more he begins to unravel, with terrifying results....

The fascinating new novel from Chris Beckett, the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author. ‘Tomorrow I'm going to begin my novel...'A would-be author has, taken time out from life in the city to live in a cabin by a river and write a novel. And, not just any novel. A novel that will avoid all the pitfalls and limitations of other novels, a novel that will include everything. At first, these new surroundings are so idyllic that it's hard to find...

Angie Redlantern is the first to spot the boats - five abreast with men in metal masks and spears standing proud, ready for the fight to come. As the people of New Earth declare war on the people of Mainground, a dangerous era has dawned for Eden. After generations of division and disagreement, the two populations of Eden have finally broken their tentative peace, giving way to bloodshed and slaughter. Angie must flee with her family across the pitch...

A tale set 150 years after the events of Dark Eden finds the world of John Redlantern and the Family transformed by a thriving civilization that hides underlying evils realized by young Starlight Brooking when she lands at the center of a power struggle. "Civilization has come to the alien, sunless planet its inhabitants call Eden. Just a generation ago, the planet's five hundred inhabitants huddled together in the light and warmth of the forest's...