It’s an absolute pleasure to reveal the cover for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s exceptional new novel, The Doors of Eden. Pan Macmillan’s designer Neil Lang, in combination with Blacksheep Design Ltd, has done such a great job here. It’s asking a lot for one image to encapsulate something as extraordinary as this book… However, as Adrian’s editor, I really hope you can get a sense of the epic journey that awaits his characters (and the reader) as they pass from the known into the unknown. And I hope you can guess at the sheer amazing depth of worlds created just for us—which by the end might feel more real than our own.

Make no mistake, this should skip your ‘to be read’ pile entirely. Instead, it belongs at the very top of your ‘must read’ shortlist! I don’t know how he’s done it, but Adrian has managed to write a gripping adventure, peopled with amazing characters—while also giving us the most awe-inspiring, inventive, breathtaking glimpse into the imagined inner workings of the universe and creation itself. I have never read anything like this. And if you read The Doors of Eden, it will enrich your life. Below Adrian has given us an insight into what inspired this book. This is followed by a look at that plot!

From author Adrian Tchaikovsky:

“From a young age I’ve been fascinated by the idea of deep time, the millions of years of life that passed before ever a human eye opened to examine the world. I’ve been fascinated, too, by all the many ‘What if?’ scenarios inherent in that span of time. I’ve been inspired by books like Stephen J. Gould’s Wonderful Life and Dougal Dixon’s After Man, looking at the process of evolution and asking ‘Did it have to go this way?’ The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar. Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.” (*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)

The Doors of Eden publishes 28th May 2020 in the U.K. with Pan Macmillan. From the catalog copy:

Lee’s best friend went missing on Bodmin Moor, four years ago. She and Mal were chasing rumours of monsters when they found something all too real. Now Mal is back, but where has she been, and who is she working for? When government physicist Kay Amal Khan is attacked, the security services investigate. This leads MI5’s Julian Sabreur deep into terrifying new territory, where he clashes with mysterious agents of an unknown power ­who may or may not be human. And Julian’s only clue is some grainy footage ­– showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor. Khan’s extradimensional research was purely theoretical, until she found cracks between our world and countless others. Parallel Earths where monsters live. These cracks are getting wider every day, so who knows what might creep through? Or what will happen when those walls finally come crashing down . . .

Bella Pagan is an Editorial Director at Pan Macmillan, running the Tor imprint in the UK. Her role includes commissioning, editing and publishing fantastic fantasy, science fiction and genre/mainstream crossover novels. She loves plot-driven, page-turning books with relatable protagonists, where you are transported to new and exciting worlds. Before joining Pan Macmillan, Bella commissioned books in the same area for Little, Brown’s Orbit imprint in the UK, where she worked for almost ten years. You can find her on twitter as @BellaPagan – and you can also find her books on www.torbooks.co.uk