NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the Nebula-nominated imagination of Isaac Claremont comes a kaleidoscopic novel of memory, music, time slippage, and contagion that arcs from the windswept highlands of 1911 to a cobalt-lit megacity beneath the lunar regolith five centuries hence. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Tor.com, Goodreads. "One of [Claremont's] most audacious works—philosophically nimble and emotionally piercing." —Los Angeles Review of Books
Alastair Muir is nineteen when he is shipped from London to the American Southwest after a blunt, mischievous soliloquy humiliates his father at a Belgravia garden fête. He disembarks at the Port of New Orleans, rides freight north and west to the copper town of Bisbee, and wanders into the Ponderosa forest above Mule Pass. In the stillness he hears it: a thin, uncanny thread of music—a glass harmonica spiraling through the air as if played inside a vaulted transit hall—while the outline of a maglev platform flickers between the trees, ticket kiosks blooming like ghost orchids from the soil. The sound marks him; the vision refuses to leave.
Two centuries later Mina Arroyo, a widely read essayist from Aster Vale—a Martian valley of terraced gardens and ultraviolet dusk—descends to Earth for a fellowship that drifts into a months-long journey by night trains and ferries. Her home lies beneath a dome of spiderglass and basalt ribs; her notebooks are packed with transit maps and weathered metro cards. Hidden deep in the center of her acclaimed plague chronicle is a passage no reader can quite explain: a busker coaxing impossible chords from a glass-bell instrument in a cavernous mobility hub as a heathered moor rises from the marble floor. When Earth shutters under the first wave of the Kestrel Flu, Mina finds herself stranded in Reykjavík with a pocket recorder and a growing suspicion that the music has followed her across worlds.
In Nightgrid, a black-skied subterranean metropolis carved beneath what used to be Santa Fe, Galen Rook is a temporal epidemiologist at the Institute for Recurrence Studies, tracing the Kestrel Flu's neurological afterimages—auditory hauntings that bloom like auroras in the brain. The White Sands Time Array flags a standing chord emanating from the Arizona backcountry, the same signature stitched through archival wax cylinders and a decommissioned satellite, LYSANDER-3. As Galen builds a cartography of echoes, he follows threads that entangle a fallen heir haunted by a forest that becomes a station, an expatriate writer caught oceans from home, and Jun Park, a coder who designs illegal lullabies for machines and believes that history can be retuned if you know which quiet moments to touch. The pursuit carries Galen through dead observatories, into a lunar arcology nicknamed Selene Yard, and back to a hillside where a train that was never built keeps briefly arriving.
Echoes of Tomorrow's Sky is an intricate, generous novel about art that survives pandemics, love that crosses planets, and the dangerous comfort of revising the past. It asks what it costs to repair a timeline, and whether the echo is the song or the ruin. With telescopes, salt-stained suitcases, a brass astrolabe that works like a pocket observatory, and a violinist who learns to play water and light, Claremont delivers speculative fiction that is playful, devastating, and unexpectedly intimate.
