Far North

Damien March hasn't thought of his eccentric uncle for almost twenty years when he receives a terse message by telegram. "Patrick dead. Father." Damien, a journalist for the BBC in London, is even more shocked to learn that he has inherited his uncle's ramshackle house on Ionia, an isolated island off the coast of Cape Cod. Offered the choice between his own humdrum life and the strange isolation of his uncle's, he decides to make the swap.

It soon turns out, however, that Damien's step into a new future means moving circuitously into his family's past. Once settled, he begins rummaging through his uncle's possessions, uncovering letters and writings that provide scattered clues to Patrick's solitary life. When he discovers a fragment of an unpublished novel, , the stakes in this paper chase are suddenly higher.

Mycroft Holmes, the older brother of Sherlock, is one of literature's most intriguing absences. A neglected genius who lives in obscurity, he bears a striking resemblance to Patrick himself. The parallels quickly grow more disconcerting, and a sinister tale of murder and deception takes on new meaning.

Whatever this is, it started when Nicky Slopen came back from the dead.

Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive.

Yet nothing can make him change his story.

From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth — a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death.

With echoes of Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Mary Shelley, Dostoevsky’s Double, and George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.