The Great When

Author Alan Moore
Narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 13 hours and 29 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Conjuring and magic, Dark fantasy, Fantasy, Historical fantasy, The Arts.

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Bloomsbury presents The Great When by Alan Moore, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

This audiobook features an exclusive essay, The True History of What Didn’t Happen, written and read by Alan Moore.

A propulsive tour through a fantastical London, where history and myth collide, murder stalks the streets and the mundane becomes very magical indeed…

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?

Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks bizarre and disastrous repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse).

So begins a journey delving deep into the city’s occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some from legend, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the centre of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever.

Thrilling, lyrical and sparkling with dark humour, The Great When is the first book in a new series by Sunday Times-bestseller and icon, Alan Moore.

'A breathless time-travelling classic. Savage, humane, comic, terrifying' Iain Sinclair

‘Brilliant and so powerfully imaginative’ Adam Curtis

'A weird book and a complete joy' Mariana Enríquez

‘A masterful step from one of our very best, uncompromising storytellers; Moore peels back the layers of London and reveals not only the history we know, but the histories that could have been, and, underneath it all, both the dark and beautiful truths about who we are as a nation.’ Heather Parry

Critics Review

Think Terry Pratchett writing one of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels – but still unmistakeably Alan. This has ‘massive hit’ written all over it

John Higgs

Alan Moore is a visionary artist and a myth maker, and in The Great When he delivers the mystical core of the occult tradition of London: a fantasy novel that features Arthur Machen, Austin Osman Spare, an alternative world that is more real than ours, bookstores, crime and a city traumatized by the war. And he does this with fun, with challenging and beautiful writing, with delight and with the knowledge that there are portals and only a few can access them. This is a weird book and it’s a complete joy

Mariana Enríquez, author of OUR SHARE OF NIGHT

Like Dickens, Alan Moore has us waiting on the dock, impatient for the next installment of his breathless, time-travelling classic. A preternaturally convincing hallucination from London’s fetid past transports us, in some mysterious way, over the abyss of our impoverished post-digital present. Savage, humane, comic, terrifying: and that’s just the first page. Now read on

Iain Sinclair

A profound, gorgeous novel of secret magics and lost souls

Sunyi Dean, Sunday Times Bestselling author of THE BOOK EATERS

[Moore’s] lyrical style is a play of poetry and metaphor with a dash of dry humour … This is a lavishly crafted urban fantasy tale with a caustic and colourful cast, perfect for fans of Susanna Clarke

Library Journal

What Alan Moore has done is written a powerful, imaginative and beautiful battering ram that blasts through the narrow, static vision of the world we have today. At a time when we are told there is nothing else, that this is it – now and forever – The Great When opens the door to the thrilling idea that there could be all kinds of other worlds and other possibilities. That there could be something else beyond. And he does it funny and beautifully

Adam Curtis

A masterful step from one of our very best, uncompromising storytellers; Moore peels back the layers of London and reveals not only the history we know, but the histories that could have been, and, underneath it all, both the dark and beautiful truths about who we are as a nation

Heather Parry

The worldbuilding is extraordinary and the plot is utterly gripping. Readers are sure to be sucked in

Publishers Weekly

A masterful storyteller… [Moore] turns his impressive imagination towards London.. [his] exuberant prose demands we see the magic and beauty that are intertwined with the mundane life of the city

City AM

It’s a romp, full of loving attention to the past

Sunday Times

The horror and ghastly beauty of this nether-realm are vigorously conveyed by Moore, while his evocation of the post-war capital, all bombsites, deprivation and grubby behaviour, is wonderfully immersive… a heady tumble of language, full of allusions and ripe adjectives

Financial Times

In The Great When, [Moore’s] language is inflamed, a beautiful riot. Onomatopoeia, rhyming slang, wicked anachronisms, slap-happy metaphors: this is the antidote to the Ozempic prose of modern, MFA-incubated novellas

Guardian

A portent of even greater wonders yet to come

Times Literary Supplement

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