‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ – Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender

The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.

For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma’s breathtaking capital, assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea…

A bravura reimagining of an alternate history, Red Smoking Mirror is a richly written novel of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash, and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.

‘A vivid, richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity, both in its detail and in its emotional impact’ – Cynan Jones, author of Cove
‘With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin’ – Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender
‘Nick Hunt deftly pulls off a delicately embroidered tale of what so easily might have been. A feast of language and imagination, briming with very real detail and insight’ – Benedict Allen, author of Explorer
‘Like a haiku a couple of hundred pages long, Red Smoking Mirror is taut, poised and powerful. There’s not a spare word. Every inflection counts. Hunt has produced something truly special; a novel that both broods and races, and which tells us vital, troubling and hopeful things about ourselves’ – Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild
‘A novel of great originality, humanity, and quest’ – Dan Richards, author of Outpost
‘A rich and accomplished reimagining of Aztec colonial history’ – Em Strang, author of Quinn