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.
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place 2024
A vivid, richly inhabited account which rings with authenticity
– 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
Like a haiku a couple of hundred pages long, Red Smoking Mirror is taut, poised and powerful. 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 beautifully written evocation of a world that never was
– Lisa Tuttle in the Guardian
Immersive, transporting, spectacular
– Fiona Mozley, author of Elmet
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
The reader wanders through Hunt’s richly imagined Tenochtitlán in a beautiful stupor
– Michael LaPointe in the TLS
A straight-up novel of intrigue, full of shadowy secrets, cloak-and-dagger politics and intimate betrayals … it offers a dark, half-obscured reflection of reality
– Jonathan McAloon in the FT
A novel of great originality, humanity, and quest– Dan Richards, author of Outpost
A rich and accomplished reimagining of Aztec colonial history. I loved its boldness
– Em Strang, author of Quinn
Red Smoking Mirror is published by Swift Press and available here