You and Cairo or Mahmoud - who’s gonna be home first?” I know you don’t want to, and I know you’ve tried your best all day long and you’re totally flaxed, tired as a frickin’ dog, but you got to keep going. You can rest soon, but for now you’ve got to keep going. “Now listen, you’ve got to keep walking - it’s almost night. Spider lowers his arms, crouches to the little girl, who is crying hard. He narrows his eyes at Spider, gives his head a faint but unequivocal shake - reminding him not to disobey Amasha. In his late twenties, he is dressed in traditional kurta pajamas of pale gold, his hair is straight and groomed, his nose high, shoulders square, and he has the natural authority of a pope. He ducks under the camel’s neck and bends to take the little girl in his arms, but before he can hoist her up onto his shoulders, Noor, the tall man at the head of the train, turns. Spider stops, and the camel stops obediently next to him. Now that the sun is setting, the structures cast shadows immense as mountains collapsed across the sand. Vast funnel-shaped towers, some as much as a hundred meters tall and a hundred wide. He doesn’t look up at his surroundings, the long featureless tracts of sand, up to forty clicks in every direction, the distant cities and structures of iron.
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His eyes are itchy with tiredness, but he keeps going, placing one foot after the other, registering the places on his neck where his skin has burned in the last two days, the point in his boots where the leather is thin and rubbing his sole. Spider wraps the camel’s rope tighter around his fists and leans into the walk, putting everything he has into it. Don’t pay attention, she will soothe herself.” But for the sake of the family, we can’t stop. “Have you seen?”Īmasha doesn’t turn back to look - she keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon. “Hey,” he mutters, leaning his head sideways to Amasha. The little blond-haired girl, who has been trotting bravely next to the camel for the last two hours, is crying with fear. Spider glances over his shoulder to check the family are keeping up. In her expression there is no urgency, no betrayal that she feels the same fear as the rest of the family.
Next to Spider walks Amasha: squat and round-figured, moving like a regal ocean-going ship, her veils fluttering around her face.
He leads the family’s single camel, laden with equipment the camel is as downcast as the family, forlorn and battered, and she drags her feet, and her humps are pitifully slumped. Spider knows that of all the family he’s the strangest sight - though he stands almost two meters tall, is whiplike, and healthy as a young tree, it’s his clothes that set him apart: he wears desert boots, aviator goggles, and a tattered woman’s dress, which the slight breeze causes to flap lazily against his tanned legs. The family are eleven in total, a raggle-taggle assortment, ranging from a child of five to a huge grey man in his sixties, and though some are able-bodied, others are less so. His skin is crusted with sweat, his tongue swollen, his feet sore, but he’ll keep going, he has no choice with the sun sinking so fast. Some days this place is all Spider can remember. The ferocious heat shimmers, although the day is on the wane and sunset isn’t. Here he is in the farthest corner of an antique desert, just one of a string of people who move silently across the sand.
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Here’s a look at the full cover, created by Sarah Riedlinger, followed by the excerpt, which introduces us to both of The Book of Sand’s worlds. Two very different worlds featuring a group of extraordinary characters driven to the very limit of their endurance in a place where only the strongest will survive. An ordinary teenage girl living an ordinary life - except that the previous night she found a sand-lizard in her bed, and now she’s beginning to question everything around her, especially who she really is … It is beginning to rain in Fairfax County, Virginia, when McKenzie Strathie wakes up. And they are willing to fight to the death to make it theirs. To survive in this alien world of shifting sand, they must find an object hidden in or near water. In the distance a group of people - a family - walks toward us.Īhead lies shelter: a “shuck” the family calls home and which they know they must reach before the light fails, as to be out after dark is to invite danger and almost certain death. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins. Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Sadly, Hayder passed away last year, but The Book of Sand is getting a posthumous release this week - and Gizmodo has an exclusive excerpt to share.įirst, here’s a summary of The Book of Sand.
A desert and a world that seems like our own form the backdrop of The Book of Sand, the sci-fi debut of bestselling author Mo Hayder (Birdman, The Treatment).
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