Charlie Connelly has chosen Red Smoking Mirror as one of his pick of ‘best summer reads’ in the New European.
Nick Hunt is the author of three excellent travel narratives, including the highly original Where the Wild Winds Are, that followed the paths of Europe’s named winds and established Hunt as an excellent storyteller. Red Smoking Mirror (Swift, £14.99) is his first venture into fiction.
Novels that imagine alternative histories usually leave me cold but Hunt’s tale of South America in the early 16th century two decades after the first Europeans arrived (not Christopher Columbus but a fleet of Moorish traders from al-Andalus in a Europe where Christianity never conquered Muslim Spain) promises something quite different.
Narrated by a Jewish merchant named Eli Ben Abram, Hunt’s tale is set in 1521 Mexica, vulnerable beneath an ominously smoking volcano as a pandemic rages and news comes of a fleet of ships heading their way led by Benmassoud, an Islamic military leader with a fearsome reputation.
“Toward the end of things, one thinks about beginnings,” writes Hunt in this unusual, highly original debut novel that will hopefully not prove his only venture into fiction.