Christopher Priest

Fugue for a Darkening Land

First edition, 1972

Fugue for a Darkening Island is Christopher Priest's second novel and one of the earliest British works of fiction to directly confront mass African migration as a political flashpoint. Set in a near-future England divided by civil war, the book follows Alan Whitman, a former academic, as the country splinters between a far-right nationalist government and Afrim separatist forces following the arrival of millions of African refugees displaced by nuclear war on the continent. Priest constructs the narrative in a deliberately fragmented, non-chronological structure mimicking the "fugue" of the title and cutting between Whitman's comfortable pre-crisis life, his increasingly desperate attempts to keep his wife and daughter safe, and his eventual absorption into the conflict itself. The ending is one of the bleakest in British science fiction of the period. Published in the US as Darkening Island.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. #10363.
Fine in dust jacket with slight shelf wear.