Signs of Life

M. John Harrison

A telling dissection of a relationship, a clear-headed look at what it was to live and love in 80s Britain. An at once surreal and forensically real novel from a critically lauded author who has influenced an entire generation of genre authors

"Harrison is a writer who transgresses conventional genre boundaries. Signs of Life is about Mick "China" Rose, an unassuming man who runs a shady and lucrative medical-transport-cum-waste-disposal business. Along with his partner, Choe, and his lover, Isobel, China drives souped-up vehicles at ferocious speeds through a dreamlike world where dystopian fantasies of biomedical wrongdoings blend with the subtly shifted reality of Harrison's Britain. Choe is a self-destructive child-man who thrashes from an unattainable idyllic past to an unstructured future full of gangsters and rancid waste dumps. Isobel values beauty and longs for physical transformation. As their destinies unfold, the story is not quite horrific, but it's superbly written and chilling, the kind of novel that will haunt you for days." Kirkus