Communion Town

Longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize

Every city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters.

Communion Town is the story of a place that never looks the same way twice: a place imagined anew by each citizen who walks through the changing streets among voices half-heard, signs half-glimpsed and desires half-acknowledged.

This is the story of a city.

‘Dazzling… What Communion Town renders with stunning and often heartbreaking lucidity is the complexity of consciousness itself… an elegant and hauntingly beautiful book’ – New York Times Book Review

‘Wonderfully atmospheric and full of a subtle gothic horror’ – Times Literary Supplement

‘Powerful, memorable writing’ – Sunday Times

‘Ambitious, haunting and beautifully written’ – Daily Mail

‘Thompson can make a sentence sing in a way that is uniquely his own’ – Daily Telegraph

‘A talent to watch’ – Financial Times

‘Sam Thompson’s city is made of stories, curling recursively around a sense of loss, a haunting, a mysterious gap in his characters’ sense of themselves. Dissociated and puzzled, they find themselves nevertheless – and often each other too. Thompson’s other talent is to be able to construct our world out of what appears to be a repeating nightmare and, against the odds, find something good in it. Communion Town sucks the reader in. It is a disconcerting but compelling location for genuinely human truths’ – M. John Harrison

Here’s an in-depth review of Communion Town for Strange Horizons by Nina Allan.

Here’s an interview about the book with Matt Freeman of the British Science Fiction Association.

Here’s a book trailer created by James Carney: