‘A beautiful story of intrigue and mystery’ PETER F. HAMILTON’Loss Protocol is Paul McAuley on top form’ KIM NEWMAN’An eco-thriller like no other from one of Britain’s best SF writers’ THE GUARDIAN’Which one feels realer, truer. The world we lived in most of our lives, or the world we dreamed up?’Eight years after the catastrophic downfall of the cult his sister Izzy had joined, Marc Winters has at last found a refuge from unwanted attention.

The wildlife ranger of a small, unremarkable island, he’s quietly helping to preserve what survives of nature in a world wracked by climate change and chaotic weather, and trying his best to put his past behind him. But then his narrowboat is burgled, the counterterrorism police come calling, and everything he thought he knew about the cult and his sister’s fate is turned upside down. A cabal of so-called deep dreamers has revived the cult’s crazy belief that the world could be healed by collective dreams fuelled by psychotropic mushrooms.

They appear to think that Winters possesses information crucial to their success, and when he tries to discover more about them, he becomes inextricably entangled in plans that challenge his very existence. Blending noir-inflected conspiracies and double-crosses, fantasies of dream science, and elegiac evocations of a depleted world, Loss Protocol’s chimerical story keeps its secrets until the last page.