Ian McDonald - Hopeland

They met while London burned. A encounter during a riot brought Amon Brightbourne together with Raissa Hopeland on a mad rooftop hunt for a family heirloom: a Tesla Coil. But there is no such thing as chance where Amon is concerned: he's been exiled from his family home because he's both cursed and blessed with the Grace — he lives a charmed life, but at the expense of those closest to him. The Grace made him fall in love with Raissa, and with her family, the extraordinary Hopelands — a family like stars in the sky, scattered but connected in constellations of affection, parenthood, love and responsibility.



But a terrible misunderstanding tears them apart, and sends Amon on a journey through the ever-extending Hopeland family, touching lives and shaping the course of the unfolding 20th century. Raissa's life is also changed by that moment, from free spirit to major player in the unfolding story of the 21st century in an Iceland transformed by the Artic thaw.



Over twenty years their lives and loves orbit around each other, through climate change, new religions, economic and technological revolution, resource wars and mass migration as Raissa tries to unite her family. there is — and always will be — Hope in her name. They love each other but they can never be with each other — until Amon must choose between family and his fear of what the Grace will do to the woman he has always loved.



Hopeland is a sprawling, picaresque, magical, marvelous novel — love story, family saga, tech thriller, science fiction — that takes you to the heart of the woes and promises of this most astonishing of centuries.