Winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction.

It’s the summer of Dissolution. As the United Kingdom prepares to break up into three nations – Northern Ireland is already someone else’s problem- the Counterculturals have gathered, in Hyde Park, at Glastonbury, and notably in the meadows by the river at Reading, for a festival where everything’s allowed. Amongst them is a talented and precocious girl called Fiorinda, rock and roll princess by birth, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O’Niall.

Instead, she finds Ax Preston, the soft-spoken guitarman with bizarre delusions about saving the country from the dark ages. And together with Sage Pender, techno-wizard king of the lads, they join the pop-icon team that’s supposed to make the government look cool. Each of them has some reason for getting involved; none of them knows where this is heading.

When they said that everything was allowed, down by that riverside, they weren’t envisaging automatic rifles and they didn’t imagine that soon they would be running the country. Bold As Love is a fantasy about rock legends, true romance and the real England.

“She is one of Britain’s most brilliant sci-fi writers” – The Guardian