NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Goodreads Choice Awards Semifinalist!

B&N Editor’s Pick – Best ScienceFiction and Fantasy of 2017

From bestselling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.

When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and languages, accidently meets military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that will alter their lives and human history itself. The young man from a shadowy government entity approaches Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible offer. The only condition: she mustswear herself to secrecyin return for the rather large sum of money.

Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove that magic actually existed and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its practitioners. Magic stopped working altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition at Londons Crystal Palacethe worlds fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about the modern world “jams” the “frequencies” used by magic, and its up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic OperationsD.O.D.O.gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive . . . and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his expanding operation master the science and build the technology, they overlook the mercurialand treacherousnature of the human heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize all of Neal Stephensons work and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Gallands storytelling style, this exciting and vividly realized work of science fiction will make you believe in the impossible, and take you to placesand timesbeyond imagining.