Telluria

<b>In the warring neo-feudal society of this cross-genre novel for fans of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson the greatest treasure is a dose of tellurium--a magical drug administered by a spike through the brain.</b> <p/><i>Telluria</i> is set in the future when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe China and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces each cultivating its own ideology or identity a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds in which no one power dominates. What does however travel everywhere is the appetite for the special substance tellurium. A spike of tellurium driven into the brain by an expert hand offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered it means death. <p/>The fifty chapters of <i>Telluria</i> map out this brave new world from fifty different angles as Vladimir Sorokin always a virtuoso of the word introduces us to among many other figures partisans and princes peasants and party leaders a new Knights Templar a harem of phalluses and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. The book is an immense and sumptuous tapestry of the word carnivalesque and cruel and Max Lawton Sorokin's gifted translator has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson.