This haunting and comic fable from the critically acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers’ Ball is a beautiful and heartbreaking journey through memory, loss and imagination.
Rumour and suspicion engulf an eerily fog-bound town as its residents begin to receive tickets promising passage across the mist-shrouded bay to the mysterious ‘other side’. For Alex and his family, this seems like the beginning of a great adventure, but as reports of a shadowy, half-glimpsed ship start to circulate, so too does the gossip and anxious speculation.
Dreamlike and immersive, it’s a pantomime nightmare, surreal, terrifying and hilarious, full of masks and metamorphoses. It’s a world seen through the eyes of children, magical, kaleidoscopic and incomprehensible.
Inspired by surrealism, silent film and early 20th Century art, the book represents his literary attempt to marry an intensely visual and poetic style to empathetic characters, a genuine mystery, and a compelling plot. It aims to balance the dreamlike and the familiar, the comic and the unsettling, the lyrical and the uncanny. Intensely readable, and yet suggestive and ambiguous, the novel attempts to map out a new direction in contemporary fiction, away from realism toward something stranger, more beautiful and more disorientating.
“Mingling the darkly humorous childscapes of Roald Dahl with fantastic imagery that could have come from the early surreal silent film classic “A Trip to the Moon” by Georges Méliès, I was captivated by the mystery at the core of this book. Funny and heartbreaking, surreal and insightful, this is a brilliant work of speculative fiction. Go on the strange pilgrimage with Alex, you will not be disappointed.”Christien Gholson author of A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind
“Alan Bilton’s extraordinary and ground-breaking second novel takes us into a magical world: it’s at once comedic, exuberant and – in a strange way – elegiac. The Welsh setting links the joy of hwyl with the pain of hiraeth, longing. The novel is an adventure story and a tale of unredeemable loss. The narrator, Alex, is a child of a warmly close family: imaginative, bright and dreamy, he records the strange events of his family’s journey in a voice of great vitality. The novel’s language is wildly delicious – however dark the matter it records, Bilton’s prose has a virtuoso quality, presenting events as a kind of imaginative jeud’esprit”Author Stevie Davies
“Engages the imagination … populated as it is with such a rich cast of characters and their sea of voices”
Cath Barton, Wales Arts Review
“The word ‘immersive’ is a bit over-used these days, but it’s hard to avoid in this case. Reading The Known and Unknown Sea is like falling instantly into a deep and vivid dream, a sometimes nightmarish dream – surreal, utterly convincing, impossible to wake up from”
novelist Chris Keil
“Bilton is a talented writer, and this is certainly a novel to get your hands on if you have a taste for the dark, the mysterious, and the weird”
Paul Cooper, New Welsh Review
