{"product_id":"end-of-the-world-blues-isbn-9780553589962","title":"End of the World Blues","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom Jon Courtenay Grimwood, author of the celebrated Arabesk series, comes a stunningly  inventive novel of futuristic noir set in a world of shifting realities. Here a man  is drawn into a gritty postmodern subculture and a secret kingdom of otherworldly  beings to find what he lost long ago: a reason to live.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Kit Nouveau figured he’d  already come to the end of the world. An Iraqi war veteran, expatriate, and part  owner of Pirate Mary’s, the best Irish bar in Tokyo, Kit had settled down to await  the inevitable with barely a whimper. It wasn’t exactly how Kit thought he’d end  up, and he was right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s going to end up a lot worse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A teenage runaway with  fifteen million dollars in stolen cash and a taste for cosplay is about to save Kit’s life in a lethal swirl of scarlet and bridal lace. Lady Neku, a.k.a. Countess of  High Strange, has her own dangerous destiny to fulfill and it’s mysteriously connected  to Kit’s ravaged past. Now Kit’s only hope for redemption is to save an ex-girlfriend  he tragically failed once before. But everyone says it’s already too late. And she’s left behind only one ominous clue: her suicide note.“Fast yet humane, hip yet bizarre, futuristic yet embedded in the absolute present moment of the world, Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s novels read like thrillers but maintain a kind of caring irony and clarity of political vision which not only make him one of the best of the new U.K. SF writers but suggest new directions for every kind of writing.”—M. John Harrison, author of \u003cb\u003eLight\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Defiantly individual, and works in that interesting margin where myth, futurism, literature and pop culture all interbreed.” —\u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e, UK\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Grimwood's latest tale reads as if Kurt Vonnegut were writing manga for the producers of \u003ci\u003eDoctor Who\u003c\/i\u003e.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003eJon Courtenay Grimwood lives in England. The third book in his acclaimed Arabesk series, \u003cb\u003eFelaheen\u003c\/b\u003e, won the 2003 British Science Fiction Association Award, appeared on \u003ci\u003eLocus Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e's 2003 Recommended Reading List, and appeared on SFSite's Best of 2003 list.\u003ci\u003eChapter One \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFriday, 15 August 2003\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater, Kit Nouveau was to realise that his world unravelled in Tokyo, six months after a cos-play stuffed large amounts of money into a locker that could be opened with a cheap screwdriver, had anyone known what it contained. Until then, he’d thought it ended fifteen years earlier, at 10.38 pm, on Friday, 15 August 2003, behind an old barn on the chalk hills above Middle Morton, a small town in Hampshire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho knew? Certainly not the nineteen-year-old squaddie leaning against the barn’s wooden wall. He’d come to the party with his latest girlfriend, a high-breasted Welsh girl called Amy who had a filthy laugh and, he hoped, filthy habits. Only she was inside sulking and the girl whose bandeau top he’d just undone was going out with someone else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hey,” said Kit. “It’s okay.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePushing him away, the girl re-tied a ribbon. “No,” she said. “It’s not.” Mary O’Mally wore lipstick, black eyeliner, and bare legs under a frayed white miniskirt . . . Both makeup and attitude put on in a bus shelter roughly half way between her parents’ house and the barn. She’d cut her hair since Kit last saw her and had red highlights put in.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnder his own waxed jacket Kit wore a Switchblade Lies tee- shirt, with jeans and biker boots. His fair hair had been cropped and the faintest trace of a blond, very non-regulation goatee ghosted his chin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInside the hut someone took off Original Pirate Material and slung on Tight Smile, jacking up the volume.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wait,” said Kit, when Mary tried to say something. And they both listened to the bass line, as Vita Brevis thumbed a Vintage five-string. Then came Art Nouveau, splintering Vita’s bass line with a three-chord crash, and Kit found himself fingering fret shapes onto empty air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMary grinned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’ll walk you home,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kit . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUndoing her top had been stupid but old habits died hard. Josh was a nice guy, in a rich-boy kind of way, but Mary was Kit’s ex-girlfriend and he still occasionally dreamed about her. Reassuring dreams, at least reassuring to someone who’d puked his way through an Iraqi firefight, put his sniper training into practise, and was on compassionate leave while his Colonel worked out what to do about an incident no one really wanted to make the papers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’d better go back.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Okay,” said Kit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You coming with me?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShaking his head, Kit said, “Better not. Can you get Josh to give Amy a lift home? And, you know . . .” Kit stopped, wondering how to put his thoughts into words.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What?” said Mary.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You know. If you and Josh ever . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If we . . . ?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If you split up,” said Kit, “then maybe we could try again?” His voice trailed off as he realised Mary wanted to slap him, which wouldn’t be the first time. “I know,” he said, holding up his hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No you don’t,” she said, dirty blonde hair brushing bare shoulders as she shook her head, each shake fiercer than the one before. “You have no fucking idea.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMary and Kit went out for five months, right up to the start of last year’s exams. She’d just about convinced her mother that Kit and band practise weren’t about to ruin her grades when Kit broke up Switchblade Lies, dumped Mary, and talked himself into a thirteen-week Army Preparation Course, all in the same afternoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJosh was the one who picked up the pieces and walked Mary to her exams and convinced her life could still be good. Josh was the one Mary’s mother liked, though she’d probably have liked him more if his mother hadn’t been Korean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It was just a thought,” said Kit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Yeah,” said Mary. “A shit one.” And there it might have rested, except the moon chose that moment to slip between clouds, and Mary caught tears in the eyes of the boy opposite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You broke it off,” she said crossly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s not that.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What then?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t know,” said Kit. “Life, I guess . . . You’d better go back inside. Josh will be wondering where you’ve gone.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“He doesn’t own me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hey,” said Kit. “No one owns you, I know that. No one owns me. No one owns anyone. We just get to borrow each other for a while.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe glared at him. “Did you make that up?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Yeah, I think so.” Kit thought about it. “At least, I don’t think it’s stolen from anybody else.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKit and Mary ended up pushing his Kawasaki between them, while the moon stretched an elongated couple and bike onto Blackboy Lane and night winds whispered through fields on the far side of the hedge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe barn was stained black and had been built before any of them had been born, the pub to which the hut belonged and the three farm cottages that made up Wintersprint were half a mile behind. Two of the cottages had been knocked together to make a house. It was his mother’s idea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What are you thinking?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“About Mum.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnyone else would have left it there. “Do you regret testifying?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKit’s mother had been American, an artist from New York. His father was small-town Hampshire, a Sergeant on the local police force. It would have been hard to find two people more unsuited. Their marriage had been coming apart for most of Kit’s childhood; certainly for as long as he could remember, and Kit had a good memory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne night, three years before, his parents had argued, which was nothing new. And Kit’s mother had demanded a divorce, which was also nothing new. Only this time she meant it, which was. A jogger found her at the foot of Ashley chalk pit, her skull broken and her ribs badly fractured. She’d been dead for roughly two hours, according to the coroner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuicide, said his father.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKit was interviewed and told the inspector what he’d heard. Which was far more than he’d ever wanted to hear. When asked, It was the first such argument, wasn’t it? He said no. And kept saying no, all the way through to appearing as a witness for the prosecution in court.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKit’s evidence was tainted, that was the position of the defence. He’d had his own argument with his father, a day earlier. A fierce and vicious argument, that saw Sergeant Newton forced to physically restrain his son. This was the boy’s revenge. A twisted attempt to use the death of his mother to hurt his father, a man who was already heartbroken by the loss. The jury believed the defence, and Kit and his father had not spoken since, not a single word. Although, until Kit enlisted, they’d shared the same house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You don’t think that maybe . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No,” said Kit, “I don’t.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe glanced away, moonlight on her face. Kit saw it happen. She glanced aside and bit her lip. Say it, he wanted to tell her. Only Mary wouldn’t and if he was honest Kit wasn’t sure he wanted it said. Being wrong about his father was as bad as being right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A pity,” said Mary, some time later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What? About my mother?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No,” she said, sighing. “About the band.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArt Nouveau, Vita Brevis, and Joshua Treece . . . Kit managed a smile. “Not really,” he said. “We were shit. None of us could even play.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That’s harsh,” said the girl who’d briefly been Vita Brevis—bass\/ vocals\/keyboards\/lyrics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We were worse than shit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne single, a week’s airplay on local radio, and a final fumble with Mary in the back of a van, while Josh pretended to sleep and Colonel Treece kept his eyes on the road. Kit had bought the Kawasaki with money he got selling his guitar and the only thing he’d kept was his new name, although the Art bit of that had gone the way of his hair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You want a cigarette?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No,” said Kit, “I’ve given up.” Kicking his bike onto its stand, he took the packet from her fingers and tapped one free, lighting it with a high-chrome Zippo that read, Iraq 2003, the Democracy in Action Tour. He’d borrowed it from an American Sergeant who was still waiting for him to give it back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Here,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You know,” said Mary. “We should get out of the road.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo Kit rolled his bike through a gap in the hedge and parked it. In the old days people would have read meaning into the jagged clouds and back-lit sky, the wind that dragged shivers from both their bodies and a moon as cold and clear as a world trapped in the cross-hairs of a gun sight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Time to go,” said Kit, watching Mary grind her cigarette underfoot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMary raised her eyebrows.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Curfew, remember?” As if either of them could forget. One of the reasons Mary’s mother disliked Kit—he had treated her rules as something negotiable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“They’re away.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKit looked at her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Yeah,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the lecture I got.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I would . . . no friends back to the house and no staying out all night. Your dad knows exactly how many beers there are in the fridge and the level of every bottle in the drinks cupboard. I’ve had it,” he added, when she looked surprised. “That time my parents went to London.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBack in the days when my mother was alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The weekend you had the party?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYeah, that weekend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEClouds continued to scuttle across the sky and eleven o’clock came and went, measured in bells carried on the wind from the village below. At Mary’s insistence, they counted off the bells, but called the first bell two and ended at twelve to muddle the devil.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Don’t ask,” she said. “Blame my grandmother.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA battered red Mini came by, followed by a taxi. It looked as if those unable to squeeze into Josh’s car had banded together to get a cab. Amy was among them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the next round of bells began, Mary and Kit counted them from two to thirteen and then stood up. It was meant to be a simple thank-you for watching the clouds, letting him count bells, and not holding their last argument against him. A farewell to what had been, little more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLeaning forward, Kit took Mary’s face in his hands. He expected a kiss, a shrug, and to walk her home. A snog for old times’ sake. Something by way of goodbye. Only, something happened.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Mary’s hand came up to touch his face, his fingers brushed the bare skin of her waist and a circuit closed between them, the shiver of excitement catching them both by surprise. Her lips tasted of cheap cigarettes and expensive brandy that she’d stolen from home. She said nothing when his hand found the knot on her bandeau top for a second time and even less when he reached for the buttons on her skirt. He was her first, something unexpected.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I thought you and Josh . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMary said nothing, just raised herself on one elbow and stared until Kit looked away. “No,” she said, into his silence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSlivers of daylight had begun to warm the chalk hills around them. A maroon Volvo trundled out of the village, headed for Southampton or London. Its headlights sweeping blindly over the spot where Mary and Kit lay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sorry,” said Kit. “Wrong question.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReaching over, Mary patted his face. “You don’t say.”","brand":"Spectra","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300765257957,"sku":"NP9780553589962","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553589962.jpg?v=1767726269","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/end-of-the-world-blues-isbn-9780553589962","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}