Robin Jarvis's latest creation is a world set in an alternate past - in a genre that can only be described as Scyence Fyctione! This strangely familiar Britain consists of ninety-three individual 'blessed isles' floating in the deep darkness and the story begins in December in the Gloriana Kalendar, when Elizabeth Tudor has reigned for one hundred and seventy-eight years. Into this world - a place with no animals and little technology - comes a stranger, Brindle. No one knows where he's from, or how he's arrived. But he brings strange implements and practices, and he's about to change things forever...