Cole the Magnificent

A brutal, funny and heart-rending book, it hurtles towards its fate with unremitting pace, energy and cheek. - Isy Suttie

The orphan Cole wanders the world, seeking the fabled Underground City which he has promised his love Sigrid he will find. Somewhere else entirely, Niven sits in a palace garden taking lessons in astronomy and architecture, dreaming up ways to escape being married off to one of her father’s friends.

Cole’s story is pieced together from folk songs and fragments as he travels ever onwards towards his destiny: a new life even stranger than the one before. Niven too will learn what it means to leave the garden of childhood. Their world is one of witchcraft and wishing, wisdom and regret, as they slowly learn how much it is possible to love, and suffer for the sake of love.

Comic, grotesque, lyrical, and immensely readable, Tony Williams’s fantasy picaresque is a reader’s delight. A sweeping yarn through the darkest of ages, filled with rogues, lovers, murderers, swindlers, and saints.

Reading Cole the Magnificent is like being plunged into a bardo pond of another life, another time, and whenever I had to emerge I was desperate to get back to it. Williams forgoes fussy description in favour of a biblical immediacy, tangible detail and a collective consciousness that sweeps you up from the first page. Undoubtedly original, shockingly visceral and brutally funny – it delivers with interest on the promise of his debut and confirms Tony Williams as a novelist we’re lucky to exist alongside.’ — Luke Kennard