Award-winning Melvin Burgess packs an enormous punch in this gripping, brilliant and scarily dark futuristic saga. He shies away from nothing in his story of the Volsons and the Connors, two powerful families whose gangs control London, fighting to the death for their rights to rule. When a marriage between Val Volson’s daughter Signy and the Conor is arranged as a way of creating a truce there is a brief moment of hope. But treachery and trickery of the cruellest kind soon destroy any possibility of a lasting peace. From the moment that Signy is so cruelly crippled she plots her revenge and nothing will hold her back from taking it. Drawing on the Icelandic sagas and emulating their darkness, Burgess creates a story that is rich in its understanding of the deepest emotional powers that draw people together and those that drive them apart.
In the year 2300 London is in ruins and in the hands of two warring families of ganglords, the Volsons and the Conors. To cement a truce Val Volson offers Conor the hand of his daughter Silivia, to her horror. The wedding is disrupted a msterious one-eyed prisoner who has been hanging upside down in a glass elevator shaft overlooking the banquet. The superstitious people are in no doubt that he is the god Odin and they watch in terror as he challenges themto see who can remove the special knife from the lift shaft. It is Silvia's twin brother who claims the knife and then returns to Conor. Val is killed and the three sons perish but Siggy is saved by Melanie, a pigwoman, though he has lsot Odin's knife to Conor in battle. In order to stop Silvia avenging her family's death, Conor has her legs broken to keep her prisoner, But Silvia has an ally in Cherry, a cat and shape-changer devoted to her mistress and together they plan the downfall of Conor, a plan that will also involve Siggy in taking a terrible revenge. . . .