Description:
As host, as oracle, Iain Sinclair moves through this quartet of tales, through a spectral London that once was, or might never have been.
Brief description: Iain Sinclair has lived in Hackney since 1968, working at a variously titled London project. He has published widely through mainstream and independent presses. These crimes have been comprehensively collected in a three-volume bibliography/biography by Jeff Johnson. Now published by Test Centre Books. An early prose-poetry trilogy was followed by the novels Downriver and Radon Daughters. The short-story collection, Slow Chocolate Autopsy, was a first collaboration with Dave McKean. Sinclair was formerly a used-book dealer and never quite got over it.
Review Quotes:
"Nobody can do more with a sentence's cadence, diction and imagery than Sinclair." - Washington Post
"In his unique, sinewed style. For no-one can write / Like Iain Sinclair on this planet, and indeed, / While reading one detects an empirically alien view" - International Times
"[Sinclair's] writing is inspiring, teasing and often revelatory. He explores themes I enjoy: London as Blake saw it, the New Jerusalem shining through in the city's occult geometry, its history both mundane but primarily of mysticism, of the weird, as told by its writers past and present, of Swedenborg, Machen, Ballard, Blackwood." - Flapjacks and Coffee
"With his lensman's eye and his poet's gift for glowing, precise language, Sinclair illuminates and sometimes terrifies the soul! Augmented by a profusion of images by his old partner Dave McKean, Agents of Oblivion is probably one of the best collections of fiction I have read. I expect it to bear many fresh insights in years to come." - Michael Moorcock