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‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ – Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
Shortlisted in the 2024 Edward Stanford Awards for the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place
‘A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was’ – Guardian
The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma’s breathtaking capital. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea?
‘Highly original’ – Irish Times
